Anyone underwhelmed by a Win7 install on a slightly older system?

[E-66]

I'm always a late adopter with OS's.  I didn't switch to XP until 2008.  I pre-ordered Win7 a year later for no reason other than it was offered at 50% off.  Now, 6+ years later, I finally have an unactivated copy installed on an extra HDD in the same system that I have XP installed on: SATA 2.0 Gigabyte mobo (P35, ICH9), E8400 Core2 Duo, basic video card, and 2GB DDR2 RAM (just doubled to 4 GB since I installed Win7).  The Windows Upgrade Adviser says it should run Win7 without issue, and my Windows Experience Index numbers are 7 for the CPU & RAM, 3.3 for video, and 6 for the HDD.

I'm underwhelmed so far.  Basic things I do in XP take longer in Win7.  Opening up Computer Management > Disk Management in XP happens almost instantly, but takes 3 seconds in Win7.  Opening Firefox with 10 extensions in XP takes about a second, but again takes 3 seconds in Win7.

My XP install has been customized with nLite.  I didn't even remotely try to get it as bare bones as possible, but I removed a bunch of stuff, and there are less than 5000 files in the total install.  To contrast, there are literally 10x as many files in a fresh Win7 install right from the DVD.  I know there are programs for slimming down Win7, and I'm curious how much differently a slimmed down Win7 install would run, but at this point I'm hesitant to permanently install and activate Win7 on my current setup and was wondering how any of you feel who have also installed Win7 on an older system.

Thanks.

Edited January 12, 2016 by E-66

[vinifera]

I have it on older system

and had it on even worse system

and soon will put it on even worse than worse system

 

take note that WEI score means nothing, its bul***** which you can cheat, yet it doesn't mean to system anything

 

slimmed down OS, can help as it will naturally search through less files to use (on magnetic HDD's), for SSD's this is no longer an issue

also if you want it faster

 

don't use page file and indexer and superfetch, these 3 will constantly slowdown daily usage

you can also look at black viper's guide to disable services for optimal use

[j7n]

That is progress. Every new version of a software product uses more resources, with very few exceptions. Vista was an epic jump in inefficiency. I take issue with the overhauled Event Viewer. Now that is slow with little gain in functionality, considering that it has to list hundreds more items than other parts of the MMC. I read that parts of it now use .Net.

If the system is "older", one pretty much has no choice but to use a page file. 4 GB of RAM might be enough for XP with many uses, but I still have a swap file for the occasional overflow.

I second going over the services. Totally disabling Prefetch (at boot time) was a pain in the neck. I forgot the exact location in registry where that service had a dependency, that caused the system to blue screen. It's not necessary to disable it. I just went as far as I could in slimming the OS down.

Edited January 13, 2016 by j7n

[vinifera]

we are talking about OS, not apps

XP flies with 2 gigs of RAM

7 flies with even 3

 

both no page file,

 

in fact the most hungry thing are browsers and media editor programs

but we are talking about OS

[E-66]

Thanks for the replies.  I had already shut off indexing and tweaked my services before I posted.  Since then all I've done is shut off superfetch, but I haven't noticed a difference.

 

Even if I didn't have any complaints about speed, I'd still be looking to slim down the install, so that's my next step.  I just have a lot of reading to do, as there are quite a few different "slimmer" programs out there for Win 7, whereas for XP it seemed like pretty much everyone used nLite.

[submix8c]

Turn off a whole mess of unnecessary services. dotNet Optimizer is the first to go.

 

Agreed on Black Viper recommendations. Pretty good tips there. Google

blackviper windows 7

Right at the top.

[vinifera]

pretty much all slimmers do the same

I'm aware of only 2, RT7 lite and NTlite (vlite breaks win7 SP1, so its out of question)

 

its just up to user to know what should remove and what not, tho you can "lock" certain components NOT to be offered for removal

those that usually break things if removed

 

everything else you have to do manually (7zip is your friend)

Edited January 17, 2016 by vinifera

[MrMaguire]

I have Windows 7 running on a Pentium M laptop from 2005. If you want snappy performance you need a storage device with good random read / write bandwidth. In other words, you need a fast hard drive, decent hard drives in RAID 0, or an SSD.

[The Goose]

Yes I was on a Dell Latitude D630 with Core 2 Duo 2GHz, 2GB DDR2 RAM, little video memory, and a 80GB HDD. What ran good was XP and 2000. Now have an upgraded Optiplex 780 and it runs great on there. Plan to keep 7.

[MrMaguire]

3 hours ago, The Goose said:

Yes I was on a Dell Latitude D630 with Core 2 Duo 2GHz, 2GB DDR2 RAM, little video memory, and a 80GB HDD. What ran good was XP and 2000. Now have an upgraded Optiplex 780 and it runs great on there. Plan to keep 7.

The D630 runs Vista and 7 quite well. I have several of them and I've found the 80GB hard drives they come with are rather slow, which tend to drag down performance on NT 6.x.

[sdt]

definitely found it much faster than even lightweight linux distros based on debian