I thought I should deliver thoughts on installing Windows 7 Enterprise on my older Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop.
I got this laptop on 2/1/2006 from Dell as part of a lemon policy where they replaced my even older Inspiron 8200 laptop on account of too many (13, I think) service calls during its 4 year warranty.
Anyhow, this laptop is a 1.86 GHz Pentium M Dothan single core CPU with 2 GB of RAM (came with 1 GB). It has a non-factory installed 120 GB (116 GiB) hard drive. It has an ATI MOBILITY RADEON X300 graphics card and a 15″ WUXGA 1920×1200 display (the resolution is the only sort of current specification it has – it can even display 1920 x 1200 on the lcd screen and hook up simultaneously to an HDTV at 1080p – or 1920 x 1080). It shipped to me with Windows XP Home and I upgraded it long ago to Windows XP Professional SP3.
All this means the hardware is Not Very Modern.
While installing Windows 7, I did have some driver issues and even had to run some driver installation routines in compatibility mode (Windows XP mode). I’ve finally got everything working in Windows 7 the way I want it with full driver support for everything but my Bluetooth stack. Since I’m not really big on Bluetooth, that’s okay with me. Even though Googling suggested that there’d be no support for the touchpad, the internal wireless card, the sound card and other built-in devices, that turned out not to be the case. More persistent Googling actually gave me answers (the primary one of which was to run the installers in compatibility mode).
It may be that douching out the whole filesystem and installing ANY new operating system would have helped, but it seems like the old laptop is running better and more quickly than it has in a very long time.
I use Windows 7 at work too (at work it’s on a desktop that runs a quad core CPU at 3.5 GHz with 8 GB of RAM). I haven’t noticed huge differences between the two, but then I don’t use either for big-time performance drains. I have noticed that running an audio mixing/sequencing software (Ableton Live Intro) craps out my laptop after a sufficient level of compexity whereas I can’t seem to do that to the desktop at work.
Anyhow, in general I am very pleased, even about using Windows 7 with old hardware. I am using an older hard drive enclosure for data backups and some of the file operations are slow there. A little Googling brought a possible solution there too. Disabling Remote Differential Compression may do it, but I am a little skeptical.