XP or 7?

Hi, I was wondering which one would be a better idea on an old system:

AMD 64 3000+

512MB ram (it's cas 2... I've been trying to find more of it, it was rare then and it's especially rare now so I might be willing to downgrade to slower memory but more of it if need be).

With or without dedicated video?

With only 512MB of RAM I'd recommend XP. XP with SP3 will even be a bit slow with only 512MB of RAM.

Linux would be a good option if that's a possibility.

xp for sure.... ull be runnin out of ram quick on win 7 (dont even think about vista)

check out the program called "nlite" u can strip down and slipstream xp sp3 into one install so its much cleaner and less of a memory hog.

Thanks guys, I used to run XP on it and I'm not planning on running anything special on it... just need the comps CPU pretty much. I just wasn't sure whether 7 would have been better since people have been saying that 7 is supposed to run better on computers than XP. It's quick on this computer so I was thinking maybe its going to be fine on that one as well.

What's dedicated video? I've just got an ATI 9200 in that comp. Decent video card... good enough for what I need it for.

Atomic_Sheep said:

Thanks guys, I used to run XP on it and I'm not planning on running anything special on it... just need the comps CPU pretty much. I just wasn't sure whether 7 would have been better since people have been saying that 7 is supposed to run better on computers than XP. It's quick on this computer so I was thinking maybe its going to be fine on that one as well.

What's dedicated video? I've just got an ATI 9200 in that comp. Decent video card... good enough for what I need it for.

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i would say it [windows 7] would run fine with 1gb of ram in the comp. I ran win 7 on my netbook with 1gb for quite some time without issues. Just dont expect to multitask huge amounts.

As far as dedicated video, it means do you have an add in gfx card (which the ati 9200 is) or are you using the onboard video (which almost always uses system ram for the onboard gpu ram... thus reducing the amount of ram the OS can use for actual RAM duties)

Oh ok... thanks... well I suppose I can always install both and see which one I like more for the system... without activating it... forgot about that... hmm well will see... thanks guys.

Unless you have some need for Win 7, definitely use XP. Win 7 is slower and requires more RAM. It also does not run a lot of legacy software unless you buy the over-priced professional version which has XP bundled to run older apps and requires a ridiculous amount of disk space to install the dual O/Ss.

Actually... I'm a total idiot, you just reminded me that I can't install 7 for the simple reason that it doesn't support game ports. Well that solves that!

What ram do you have?

Corsair CMX 512-3200XL v1.1 somethign like that.

nd4spdbh2 said:

xp for sure.... ull be runnin out of ram quick on win 7 (dont even think about vista)

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Vista isn't that much different. Windows 7 still seems to use RAM about as aggressively.

They both seem to keep using the pagefile, even with 1 GB and no third party scanners installed!

It seems that you have to terminate tons of stuff to even get even close to XP in RAM usage, let alone Puppy and SliTaz.

This is because Vista and 7 cram as much stuff as they can and the problem is usually only noticed when launching bigger apps.

Vista and 7 are superb with starting smaller apps. (Because the RAM usage algorithm at least gives enough free RAM for them to fit)

This is why newer games tend to suffer. This appears to be why some game makers specify higher RAM requirements for Vista and 7 then with XP.

But in Vista's and 7's defense, when Windows knows the usage pattern of the web browser app and apps using less RAM than about 192 MB, then it ends up launching them real fast, even from a reboot.

Even with the memory upgrade i'd still say to go with XP. But I would reccomend XP no matter what just because I can't stand 7 for some reason...