After the massive criticism Microsoft got for the system requirements of Windows Vista it decided to go in the opposite direction with Windows 7 from the very beginning. Microsoft’s next operating system has been marketed as an operating system with lower system requirements and that despite the many cool features will run on older or simply weaker hardware just fine, among others Intel’s Atom processor. The requirements for Windows 7 state 512MB RAM minimum and 1GHz processor, but curious users have managed with much less.
User Hackerman1 at The Windows Club has published screenshots from Windows 7 where he has charged up the operating system with a 266MHz Pentium II processor, released in May 1997, 96MB RAM and 4MB graphics card.
Hackerman1 revealed that the operating system refused to boot with 64MB memory, but with 96MB you get into Windows and can start system information. The next test is with a Pentium 1 166MHz processor, but so far he needs to find a power supply first.
In the same thread a user called tormented has published his own screens with an AMD K6-2 500MHz processor with 512MB RAM. He managed to downclock the processor to 167MHz and start the operating system, although it took 20 minutes.
Windows 7 is without a doubt compatible with weak hardware and the question is how old systems you can use. The RAM limitations seems to be the biggest problem, neglecting certain performance hits.
