AJWhite1970 Posted October 3, 2012 Posted October 3, 2012 Lowest spec Windows 7 PC's here are Dell Optiplex GX520's, 745's and 755's. All with 2gb RAM and 160Gb hard disks. Perfectly acceptable for staff rooms doing nothing but Hotmail, BBC sports website, office and registers, I wouldn't recommend doing Photoshop on them though... The remaining Dells will be retired Summer 2013 as student lab PC's get replaced on the usual 3 year cycle. Andrew
kernewek-sam Posted October 3, 2012 Posted October 3, 2012 Similar or OP: Dell Optiplex GX620: 80 GB SATA, 1 GB ram, Pentium D 2.8 GHz. [slow but serviceable for simple word processing and some undemanding web browsing] That was my machine (at work) until recently though had 2GB ram running Windows 7. As a joke we did manage to install 7 onto an old Ergo tablet, graphics were awful but it ran with 512MB ram (just about).
dhoward_westexetc Posted October 9, 2012 Posted October 9, 2012 Oldest desktops are Pentium 4 3GHz with HT, 2GB RAM, Radeon Xpress 200M graphics and 80 GB IDE drives. We have around 110 of those. They probably wouldn't be that slow except for their painful IDE drives! Perfectly usable though. We also have a few Pentium M 1.7 desktops, 2GB RAM and an add-in NVidia G210 GPU, and these are surprisingly sprightly on Windows 7 despite their single core processors! Probably because they are SATA drives. Oldest laptops are Core Duo 1.6GHz, 3 or 4 GB RAM and 945GM graphics. They're out of warranty so I pieced together the best 60 or so and added a decent amount of RAM using what I had spare. These go really quite well on Windows 7! I had also managed to get Win 7 on a laptop with a Pentium M 1.6GHz, 855GM graphics and 1GB RAM. No DirectX, but were OK for word processing. We've all but retired those ones now however as they are almost 9 years old!
SYNACK Posted October 9, 2012 Posted October 9, 2012 Oldest desktops are Pentium 4 3GHz with HT, 2GB RAM, Radeon Xpress 200M graphics and 80 GB IDE drives. We have around 110 of those. They probably wouldn't be that slow except for their painful IDE drives! Perfectly usable though. We also have a few Pentium M 1.7 desktops, 2GB RAM and an add-in NVidia G210 GPU, and these are surprisingly sprightly on Windows 7 despite their single core processors! Probably because they are SATA drives. Oldest laptops are Core Duo 1.6GHz, 3 or 4 GB RAM and 945GM graphics. They're out of warranty so I pieced together the best 60 or so and added a decent amount of RAM using what I had spare. These go really quite well on Windows 7! I had also managed to get Win 7 on a laptop with a Pentium M 1.6GHz, 855GM graphics and 1GB RAM. No DirectX, but were OK for word processing. We've all but retired those ones now however as they are almost 9 years old! We did the same kind of thing an HT made a huge difference. The 2GHz Celerons with 1.2GB of RAM were a bit rubbish but still worked. 7 works on a surprising amount of old tech.
newpersn Posted October 9, 2012 Author Posted October 9, 2012 (edited) I did have windows 2008 server working on a Old Dell 170L, 2gb ram 2.8Ghz. 40GB IDE hard drive. Was only the AV Server Edited October 9, 2012 by newpersn
SYNACK Posted October 9, 2012 Posted October 9, 2012 I did have windows 8 server working on a Old Dell 170L, 2gb ram 2.8Ghz. 40GB IDE hard drive. Was only the AV Server W8 Server do you mean 2012 or were you running it on the client OS?
Davit2005 Posted October 9, 2012 Posted October 9, 2012 Ergo Core Duo's with 512MB, the extra 1GB memory module had not been inserted properly. The logon speed was noticably longer than the others.
SYNACK Posted October 9, 2012 Posted October 9, 2012 Ergo Core Duo's with 512MB, the extra 1GB memory module had not been inserted properly. The logon speed was noticably longer than the others. I would not go any lower than 1gb personally, it works but OMG it is slow.
dhoward_westexetc Posted October 9, 2012 Posted October 9, 2012 (edited) We did the same kind of thing an HT made a huge difference. The 2GHz Celerons with 1.2GB of RAM were a bit rubbish but still worked. 7 works on a surprising amount of old tech. I learnt the lesson that a Celeron is not powerful enough. We retired a huge batch of laptops that had Celerons, they were just not up to the job. A Pentium with two cores is just fine, a Pentium 4 HT just about hangs on. The best batch of processors we bought recently were the Wolfdale Pentiums, E5200 or E5400. They were fairly cheap but they are really fast, especially when we upped the RAM to 4 GB. Edited October 9, 2012 by dhoward_westexetc
newpersn Posted October 9, 2012 Author Posted October 9, 2012 W8 Server do you mean 2012 or were you running it on the client OS? opps. Ment to say Server 2008.
gmonks Posted October 9, 2012 Posted October 9, 2012 opps. Ment to say Server 2008. Wow, what was the performance like?
newpersn Posted October 10, 2012 Author Posted October 10, 2012 Wow, what was the performance like? It was alright. Had to reboot it once a week. But just for av it was fine.
gmonks Posted October 10, 2012 Posted October 10, 2012 It was alright. Had to reboot it once a week. But just for av it was fine. Well good to get your money's worth out of a machine!
newpersn Posted October 10, 2012 Author Posted October 10, 2012 Well good to get your money's worth out of a machine! why not. Now its retired and we are running it on a old stone computer. (Dual core @1.6 but with 3gb of DDR2 Ram in)
gmonks Posted October 10, 2012 Posted October 10, 2012 why not. Now its retired and we are running it on a old stone computer. (Dual core @1.6 but with 3gb of DDR2 Ram in) So that just runs anti virus as well? Yeah I'm all for it! I've turned an old pc into a server before, again doing hardly nothing, it ran well!
newpersn Posted October 10, 2012 Author Posted October 10, 2012 So that just runs anti virus as well? Yeah I'm all for it! I've turned an old pc into a server before, again doing hardly nothing, it ran well! and it also runs WDS aswell.
gmonks Posted October 10, 2012 Posted October 10, 2012 and it also runs WDS aswell. Yeah so fairly light work - well depending on how often you image machines!
chazzy2501 Posted October 10, 2012 Posted October 10, 2012 running 32bit win 7 pro on P4 2.4 w/o hyperthreding and a 1gb ram (upgraded from 256!) on original IDE 40GB HDD with nod32 AV. they are ok for office 2010 and surfing I have 66 of them!
dgsmith Posted October 10, 2012 Posted October 10, 2012 The best batch of processors we bought recently were the Wolfdale Pentiums, E5200 or E5400. They were fairly cheap but they are really fast, especially when we upped the RAM to 4 GB. Just done the same when upgrading the parts in a few old machines.. when you can get a Pentium E5200 £12 each ebay and 2Gb DDR3 for £5.50 it's a no-brainer. We have a single Core i3 machine, with the remainder of the network being split across core 2/pentium 4 on a 75/25 ratio. We haven't had the luxury of recent IT expenditure so are left with 3-5 year old machines being some of the best in use (network client size approx 350).
newpersn Posted October 10, 2012 Author Posted October 10, 2012 Yeah so fairly light work - well depending on how often you image machines! Not that often. 1GB connection both ends. I have a computer done within 10/20mins. I had a classroom done within a day. 1gb connections all around.
gmonks Posted October 10, 2012 Posted October 10, 2012 Not that often. 1GB connection both ends. I have a computer done within 10/20mins. I had a classroom done within a day. 1gb connections all around. Not that bad then, 1GB connection is good!
dhoward_westexetc Posted October 10, 2012 Posted October 10, 2012 Just done the same when upgrading the parts in a few old machines.. when you can get a Pentium E5200 £12 each ebay and 2Gb DDR3 for £5.50 it's a no-brainer. We have a single Core i3 machine, with the remainder of the network being split across core 2/pentium 4 on a 75/25 ratio. We haven't had the luxury of recent IT expenditure so are left with 3-5 year old machines being some of the best in use (network client size approx 350). If the Core 2 PCs would go up to 4 GB RAM then DDR2 RAM is not too expensive, 4 GB is relatively cheap. A Core 2 laptop with 4 GB RAM and Windows 7 64-bit is really quite fast, one such laptop is my work laptop! We tend to upgrade RAM in our PCs during the middle of their lifetime, around 3-4 years old as we run our student desktops now for around 8 years. When RAM started to be really cheap earlier this year I did a blitz, making everything minimum 2 GB RAM, up to either the maximum that the motherboards could support, or what Windows 7 32-bit could support! Shame that some of our older desktop boards could only take 2 GB maximum really, oh well!
here_hare_here Posted October 10, 2012 Posted October 10, 2012 We have approx 90 Dell SX280's with 2GB comfortably running CS4.
Dos_Box Posted October 10, 2012 Posted October 10, 2012 (edited) If the Core 2 PCs would go up to 4 GB RAM then DDR2 RAM is not too expensive, 4 GB is relatively cheap. A Core 2 laptop with 4 GB RAM and Windows 7 64-bit is really quite fast, one such laptop is my work laptop! We tend to upgrade RAM in our PCs during the middle of their lifetime, around 3-4 years old as we run our student desktops now for around 8 years. When RAM started to be really cheap earlier this year I did a blitz, making everything minimum 2 GB RAM, up to either the maximum that the motherboards could support, or what Windows 7 32-bit could support! Shame that some of our older desktop boards could only take 2 GB maximum really, oh well! I'd have to disagree there (but only slightly). DDRII RAM prices have skyrocketed recently compared to DDRIII. For instance at Scan you would pay £20 for a pretty average 2GB stick of DDRII 800 RAM, for DDRIII a 'performance' RAM would be £15 for a 4GB stick. It's getting to the point where I am seriously looking at upgrading a couple of motherboards/processors so I can pig-out on DDRII prices and speeds rather than paying a premium to buy ore DDRII. Edited October 10, 2012 by Dos_Box
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