Which OS Upgrade for old computer?

[ddrueding]

Thanks for that. Mind if I use it? Send credit to your website or something?

 

[Mercutio]

Sure. Whatever.

"Some guy I know from the internet" is probably going to amount to the same thing though.

 

[ddrueding]

Most of my clients have already heard of the "group of experts" I always need to fall back on. "Someone who knows more than I do" will probably work as well.

 

[Tannin]

I have lots of spare parts and some time to kill so I just resurrected an old Athlon x64 4600+ that I had retired. It has an GA-K8N51PVM motherboard. The first observation, no drivers for anything other than XP x32 so I have a challenge. Win8 no go. Win7 searched and searched but I could not find a usable chipset, network driver nor audio driver. XP x64 still no network drivers (only x32 XP drivers). I tried installing mint (Linux) but I could not get the machine to boot to a thumb drive and didn't have any blank CDR media anymore (No DVD just a CDRom) to write an image and boot off the CD further the ISO's now exceed the size of a CD:tdown:. I ended up installing an old Intel network card and that worked well enough to make the XP X64 run (Probably Win7 too but that wasn't tried) and with 4GB of ram it seems quite snappy. Hey, one more GTX 460 to fold with...

I would expect Win 7 would load all needed driver on that board Mark, straight out of the box, except possibly for the audio driver, and there is a Windows 7 64-bit audio driver for it on the Gigabyte website. (First hit when you google "GA-K8N51PVM".) I lose track of individual board models, but I don't think I have ever been stuck for a Win 7 driver on any board new enough and nice enough for me to want to install it. So, roughly, anything with a 64-bit chip. Hell, I installed Win 7 64 on a single-core Sempron 3100 the other day. Worked perfectly, albeit no speed demon. Bear in mind here that I see quite a lot of AMD socket boards (VIA, Nvidia and ATI/AMD chipsets) because that was pretty much all we sold for many years and honestly, the Win 7 drivers always just sort themselves out without me having to do anything. Sometimes I have to hand-load network or audio drivers, not very often.

 

[Tannin]

I am reading Merc's long post with interest and will come back later to respond to it (and to thank him for taking the time to write it). Just one little nit-pick:

Unfortunately, it’s also not worth upgrading the version of Windows on your old computer to a current release. Windows licenses are expensive and they’re almost always tied to individual, specific hardware. No one wants to spend $100 on a software license for a computer that might only live another six or nine months!

Actually, no. Only the OEM licence is tied to the hardware. (There may be some weird corporate restrictions too on big site licences, but I never see any of those and can't comment.) All retail MS OS licences are single-copy, use-on-anything licences. You can run them on any hardware you want, and change the hardware at will, as often as you like, without limit. This "retail" category includes Full Retail (very expensive boxed Windows!); Upgrade (boxed retail upgrade packages, generally around the same cost as OEM Windows, say around AU$150); On-line upgrade (can be dear as poison or very cheap - hope you all got in for those introductory downloadable retail upgrade Windows 8 Pro licences for under $50!); and some others (I'm thinking of the "Windows Genuine" programme, or whatever they called it. It was an on-line make-my-pirated-copy-legal thing, maybe they still do it. It used to cost a bit but at least you wound up with an unlimited full retail licence. Oh, and there was another one only for students with student ID a couple of years back - Windows 7 full licence for about $50 or $100.

So, depending on the type of Windows licence, it may or may not be worth upgrading. In practice, you are usually OK to upgrade the hardware with an OEM licence anyway, just so long as you upgrade the machine rather than replace it. Once in a while (one machine in 20 or 30?) the new mainboard doesn't re-activate and you have to call them. Tedious but no hu-hu.

Would I upgrade a laptop to a new Windows version? Hell no! All of what I just wrote was with desktops in mind.

 

[Mercutio]

OEM licenses (the kind I was referencing with "almost always" since as I understand it they're about 75% of the licenses sold) are tied to hardware with their Windows Activation Status, which monitors 10 hardware categories including a motherboard ID string and the MAC address of the NIC that's connected to the internet. Microsoft most certainly does have a database someplace that indicates what hardware a particular license key was used with, and if you're trying to re-used one it's their call whether or not to reactivate it. What I was trying to get at in your bolded sentence was the idea that no, you can't just read the license key off some HP machine you have sitting around just because it has a newer version of Windows, which is one of those goofy things people assume to be true .

 

[sedrosken]

Most of my clients have already heard of the "group of experts" I always need to fall back on. "Someone who knows more than I do" will probably work as well.

Yeah, you guys are my "group of people who know more than I probably ever will." Dad finds it humorous that I'm referencing real people instead of books or internet articles or whatever, actual responses to my questions.

 

[CougTek]

Dad finds it humorous that I'm referencing real people instead of books or internet articles or whatever, actual responses to my questions.

You can tell your dad that books and internet articles are written by real people too, just like the posts on our website.

 

[Tea]

Who are you calling real?

 

[Chewy509]

Who are you calling real?

Umm... http://science.slashdot.org/story/1...ns-back-up-theory-that-universe-is-a-hologram

 

[ddrueding]

Still real, but 10-dimensional real instead of 11-dimensional real.

 

[P5-133XL]

So now you'll do between 200Kppd and 210ppd.

I tried rebuilding 4 of these machines and none of them will stay running: The MB's are just toast. I have one more PCI-E MB: A C2D but no spare processor. So, no extra folding points for me.