Installing Windows 7 (Build 7000) on a Pentium III (P3) PC

After testing Windows 7 (Build 7000) on a PC with only 128Mb of memory successfully, i decided to take it to the next level - Installing it on an old Pentium P3 PC that i have laying around. It is an old Compaq Deskpro-EN SFF Pentium 3 PC. I changed the hardisk to a faster Ultra-DMA 100 IDE 30Gb seagate harddisk, upgrade the CPU to a 1.13Ghz P3, up the memory size to 384Mb & changed the CD-ROM drive to a DVD-ROM drive. No other PCI cards was added.

I powered on the PC and placed the Windows 7 installation DVD into the DVD-ROM drive and started the installation. The installation was smooth, however, it took a slightly longer time to install as compared to a P4 PC. I did not really clock the time taken to install as i left it running on its own while i spent the waiting time doing some other stuff.

Here is a screen shot of the Windows 7 computer information screen.

After the installation is completed, i noticed that some of the onboard devices was found to have missing drivers or incorrect driver installed. The onboard sound card driver was missing and the Onboard NVidia graphics card driver was not correct. As this PC was quite old, there will not be any Windows Vista drivers that i could download to fix this problem. So, i download the drivers for Windows XP instead and it worked. The drivers for the sound card is a bit tricky. The driver installation program will self-extract and start installation, but it will fail to complete and crash. At this point the sound card driver is still not installed but the driver files can be found in the self-extracted directory. Just go to the device manager and manually update the driver from there. That should be able to fix the problem.

As for the Nvidia graphics card, the driver are obtained from the official Nvidia web site. The one that i used is meant for Windows XP, but it will work on Windows 7. Download and run it.

Here is a screen shot of the Device manager together with the Task Manager.

The overall feel of running Windows 7 on a Pentium 3 PC can only be describe by one word - SLOW. There seems to be a lot of harddisk activities whenever i start some program. But once harddisk activity has stopped, the usability level returns to normal.

I have installed AVG (version 8 free edition), Adobe PDF reader 8, Firefox 3, Google Chorme, Winamp 5.5, Audacity 1.2.6 and a few other smaller windows XP program and they all install and run without much problem on Windows 7.

I would most likely be restoring the P3 PC back to windows XP as it runs more efficently on XP then on Windows 7.

There you have it folks, Windows 7 on a P3 PC. If you are game enough, why not give it a try.