December 27th, 2022 at 5:45 p.m. by Rhonda Bachmann – While in the 80s and 90s processors with a few megahertz were usually still common, today you get CPUs that are usually clocked in the gigahertz range. But what happens if you run a more modern Windows on a processor with a few megahertz? Developer and YouTuber NTDEV tested it.
How would Windows 7 actually run with a clock speed of 5 megahertz and 128 megabytes of RAM? This experiment can be observed in a new video by the developer NTDEV. NTDEV started a virtual machine in the 86Box emulator for this. This is actually marked as a Pentium-S with 50 megahertz and 128 MB of RAM, but has been clocked down to just 5 megahertz.
System starts slowly but stable
NTDEV runs the operating system on a machine with a CPU that is around 200 times less powerful than the official minimum requirements. As the developer reports, however, a lot of work was necessary. A lot of system resources had to be deactivated so that only three services are loaded when booting. The registry also had to be changed for this. The desktop in the video also has no start menu, wallpaper, or Windows Explorer.
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A little patience is also required until the Windows 7 operating system from 2009 is loaded on the machine. It takes a full 28 minutes for the system to boot up. However, NTDEV can also run four programs at once: the command prompt, WCPUID, which displays information about the CPU, Winver and Notepad.
NTDEV even ran Windows 7 at a clock speed of just 3 megahertz. However, the system was not functional enough to make an interesting video about it. Now that the experiment with Windows 7 went so well, NTDEV next wants to look at ways to get Windows 10 or Windows 11 to run on a sub-1 gigahertz processor.
Quelle: Tom’s Hardware
