Windows 7 Runs fine on 512 MB, Lack of Drivers Main Problem
A lot of people with old Intel i815 systems (that are limited to 512 MB of RAM… thanks Intel) are asking the same question that a few netbook owners are asking; Will Windows 7 run on 512 MB of RAM?
After all, Windows Vista runs on 512 MB of RAM, and Windows 7 claims to be much more RAM-friendly and efficient than Vista. Now, it may be just the beta, but the public beta does say that you should have at least 1 GB of RAM. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the netbook/subnotebook version of Windows 7, specifications for which have yet to be revealed (and probably won’t be for awhile).
The good news is, that Windows 7 Public Beta runs just fine on 512 MB of RAM. In our testing, it uses about 70% of the available RAM without any applications running.
But, the bad news is… most older systems won’t be able to run Windows 7 Public Beta well right now. None of our older ATI and Nvidia graphics cards could detect a working driver from Windows Update. Nvidia says that, at least for now, any graphics card under the GeForce 6100 won’t run on the 7 PB (and, possibly, beyond that as well… neither AMD nor NV will say what cards will make the final cut).
I ran into massive driver problem installing the beta onto an old NC6000 – all the drivers available were xp only and Win 7 just would not accept them. I had cloned my xp install to another hard drive as a backup though, and found that if I asked it to manually find the driver, then had it scan the old c:\windows directory (after connecting the drive via USB adapter) it pulled every driver I was missing, including wireless, ethernet port, sound, and graphics. You just have to do them one at a time through the device manager.