Windows 7 on IBM Thinkpad R51?

My friend purchased the above system and wants me to put Windows 7 on it, how well do you think it would run? Is it even worth it or should I just leave XP on there? It only has 512MB Ram and a 1.7ghz pentium M I think.

Cheers.

 

not really well, basically he should stick to Win XP and put his CPU resource to more productive use.

 

I've run W7 on lower spec'd Thinkpads than the R51 and it worked. You will need more RAM for sure and if he may not get the aero effects. Personally I'd leave XP or dual-boot with a linux distro if he's got itchy OS syndrome

Linux distros did eyecandy well for my machines when I enabled some compiz effects.

 

Needs more ram. I have a T42p with 2.0 pentium M and 1.5G ram, it runs windows 7, with aero, smooth as silk. You may want to check graphics driver support though.

 

You be surprised what Windows 7 can run on. My dad has a 6 year old Dell Inspiron 510m with Intel Pentium M 1.5Ghz, has 1.5GB RAM now but at the time of install it had 768MB RAM and a 40GB 4200RPM PATA drive. Windows XP SP3 felt slow so me an my friend decided to refresh it to Windows 7. Since I was a MSDN member we decided to put Windows 7 Starter on (same OS as netbooks) due to the lower hardware requirements. The only stumbling block is the graphic drivers, particularly the Intel Extreme Graphics as they don't have Win 7 drivers officially, we managed to acquire an unofficial hacked driver somewhere but afterwards it felt much more responsive and quicker to use.

Embarassingly in real world times it booted quicker than my T61 stocked with a 250GB 7200RPM drive!

 

Awesome, thanks. I think I will just leave it be with XP, and if he feels he wants 7, he can deal with the sluggish OS... Or I can recommend to him a Ram upgrade.

 

I say definitely advise for the RAM upgrade, aim for 1GB RAM minimum as either Windows XP SP3 or Windows 7 would appreciate the extra headroom to work with.

 

Yeah, I agree. Thanks!

 

ram upgrade is a necessity, your friend will notice a large performance improvement when he/she upgrades to 1 gig. It would even better with 1.5 gig or 2 gigs.

 

I'd second the upgrade to 2GB of RAM if you can. If he plans on keeping his R51 for a while, it will be pretty worth it. I had a T42 I Frankensteined together a year and a half ago that ran Vista with Aero effects enabled, but it had a Radeon 9600 GPU. It was decent with 2GB installed. When I sold it the buyer brought his own HDD with Win7 on it to test things out and it seemed pretty responsive.

 

I think the graphics chip in your friend's R51 is going to be the deciding factor. You should definitely put the RAM up to at least 1GB, but if the machine has integrated graphics, I don't think I'd bother.