Windows 7, the complete guide - part 9: Turbo Boost your laptop

Tuesday 29 September 2009
Windows 7, the complete guide - part 9: Turbo Boost your laptop

The single biggest reason for existing laptop owners to upgrade to Windows 7 is something unique to this release: it actually requires less horsepower than Vista. That's good news for netbook owners!

This isn't just clever marketing. For the first time ever in our experience, you can give a laptop struggling to run an older version of Windows a new lease of life simply by installing a later OS.

The most obvious immediate impact of this is going to be for netbooks and we expect Windows 7 to quickly become the dominant OS here.

However, as the 1.6GHz Intel Atom processors that usually run netbooks are roughly equivalent in power to a Pentium M, a typical processor found inside laptops bought five years ago, it's very possible that your ageing Windows XP laptop will be able to run Windows 7 too.

It will cost you nothing to find out. Download the Release Candidate or install it from our disc and you can dual-boot Windows XP and Windows 7.

For Vista laptops, the effect is more impressive. For example, PC Authority's editor uses an ageing ThinkPad X60 with a 1.83GHz dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo T2400 processor and 1.5GB of RAM. Vista was usable but sluggish. Installing Windows 7 brought a noticeably fresh spring to its step.

Also in our series, Windows 7 the complete guide:

Part 8: Hunting down those missing files
Part 7: Good news for gamers?
Part 6: Blu-Ray and displays
Part 5: The new XP mode
Part 4: Playing DivX and XviD files
Part 3: Will your PC actually boot any quicker?
Part 2: Raw performance benchmarks
Part 1: Good news for gamers?

Also see: The 30 Best Features of Windows 7

 

Related Articles
See more about:  windows  |  laptop  |  vista  |  microsoft  |  netbook  |  notebook
 
 
Comments: 4
chookstrangler
29 September 2009
 Why would PC Authority's editor use an ageing ThinkPad X60?

Some real world performance figures would be nice!


Comment made about the PC Authority article:
Windows 7, the complete guide - part 9: Turbo Boost your laptop?
The single biggest reason for existing laptop owners to upgrade to Windows 7 is something unique to this release: it actually requires less horsepower than Vista. That's good news for netbook owners!

What do you think? Join the discussion.
Slatts
29 September 2009
I think you should stick to strangling chooks chookstrangler.
Did you even read the article?
The whole thing was based on running win 7 on lower spec or older hardware.

As I've posted elsewhere on this forum, I'm running the 32 bit release candidate on an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ with 1.5 gig of ram.
It runs at about the same speed, as far as I can tell by eye, as XP pro on this box.
I'm very impressed so far.
chookstrangler
29 September 2009
 I read the article and I ran windows 7 on my old laptop until it died completely and was very impressed by how much better it ran.

I just thought a PC magazine editor would be using something more up to date in hardware.
.:Cyb3rGlitch:.
29 September 2009
 Again, you miss the point. The whole point of the exercise is to show the benefits of using 'turbo boost' on older hardware. Turbo boost does jack all on modern systems.

Edited by .:Cyb3rGlitch:.: 29/9/2009 08:39:55 PM
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