I watched a video of a Windows House Party. The organisers put on a great show, and I was impressed, especially with the six year old PC which is running Windows 7 well, presumably the 32-bit variant.

I have a six year old Intel G845WN. Lets take a look at what I would have to do to get a usable Windows 7 onto it..

It presently has 640mb RAM spread across all three slots, so that would need to go and be replaced by three 512mb modules if I am to get any performance at all. Cost $150. Video is an ATI Radeon 9250 c/w 128mb. This is a keeper as long as I don’t want Aero anything..

Hard drive is a 40gb Maxtor. Hmmmm. No, it has to go too, maybe replace it with a WD 80gb IDE.. Cost $60. The modem is an Intel 536EP, and onboard sound is courtesy of Intel. I am fairly sure that both would work.

So, a quick total.. cdn$210 for parts plus $119 for Windows 7 Home Premium = $329.00.

Ouch!! At the end of the day, I will have a very expensive six year old machine sporting memory that will be useless in the event that the mainboard falls over and dies, and it still will not perform all that well. Certainly not $329 well. The picture would be worse if the machine had a 3rd party sound card installed that I didn’t want to lose, or a webcam, printer, scanner.. 

Manufacturer websites are again taking hits as XP users start the search for Windows 7 drivers. I have done a bit of it while helping computer users in the Microsoft Answers forum, and it is definitely a case of ‘déjà vu’. I remember doing the same thing two years ago for XP users who wanted to upgrade to Vista. Very little has changed.

The problem is that XP users have been told that Windows 7 will run on their machines..