Can old PCs run Vista?

Posted at: Monday 14th May 2007 by David Fearon

How well can an aging PC handle Microsoft's shiny new operating system, and is it worth upgrading your old machine as far as it can go? David Fearon tinkers with an Athlon XP PC and a Socket 478 Pentium 4 PC to find out.

With a machine that has only 512MB of RAM rather than the 1GB recommended for Home Premium and Ultimate, Aero Glass is disabled by default and the Vista Basic theme is enabled instead. This isn't to say that an older graphics card can't run it, however. In fact, both the Radeon 9800XT and GeForce 6800 GT are more than capable of this, which we verified by forcing Aero Glass on. Although the transparent windows are just cosmetic features, the Flip3D task switching and thumbnail previews that Aero Glass provides are quite useful.

Once Vista was installed, the first port of call was to discover what the OS made of the hardware, via Vista's own Experience Index benchmarking system. We were surprised that, for the most part, the scores were very healthy, with 4s and 5s in every category; the one exception was the RAM, which gained a meagre 2.9. With the 9800XT, the gaming graphics score was 4.6, which should, in theory, provide decent performance.

However, our Media Benchmarks 2005 provided a less rosy picture than Microsoft's clearly optimistic indicators. The Paint Shop Pro image manipulation test achieved the best result at 0.61, but multitasking limped home with 0.31, a result of the limited RAM and slow hard drive. Meanwhile, our multithreaded TMPGEnc benchmark lamented the lack of a second CPU core with a disappointing score of 0.45.

When it came to actual games, we decided to initially test using our usual method of setting all the details to maximum, but with a resolution of 1,024 x 768 to reflect the age of the machines. We would then reduce the detail settings if necessary to get to the point at which we achieved a decent frame rate. After that, we would then upgrade and repeat the process to discover the effect on the game's appearance.

One of the major limitations of our old systems was obvious without needing to resort to the benchmark figures - the 512MB of RAM. After quitting our test games to return to the desktop, for example, we were invariably left with an unresponsive system for between 30 seconds and a minute, since what seemed to be the entire operating system was paged back into RAM from the swap file. The message is pretty clear: 512MB might be enough for XP, but it's a long way from sufficient for Vista. Clearly, 1GB is the minimum amount you should be looking at; if your old board won't support that, or you're loathe to throw away existing lower-capacity DIMMs to make room for newer higher-capacity models, don't even think about Vista.

The machine's performance in our game tests was generally reasonable if you only look at the average frame rates, but the minimum frame rates were very low, especially with all the advanced effects enabled. The Company of Heroes scores look outwardly respectable, but only because the game wouldn't allow us to switch on most of the advanced settings, including shadows and reflections, and it also didn't let us move the tree, terrain or effects qualities away from Low. Meanwhile, Far Cry performance was hamstrung by masses of swap-file activity due to the limited RAM, although the Radeon 9800XT card coped well when it wasn't waiting around for the hard disk. Need for Speed: Carbon's scores were also brought down by a lot of swap-file hammering, although when it was properly fed by the other subsystems, the frame rate with the 9800XT card was good for short periods, before data starvation and stuttering set in. When it came to the Prey test - usually a well-behaved and consistent part of our suite of benchmark games - we encountered all sorts of problems. Despite using the latest Vista-specific Catalyst drivers, the game crawled, no matter what we did to speed it up, resulting in a slide-show run-through of the benchmark tests at an average of 4fps.