I have a three year old laptop with a 120 GB hard disk, 1GB of RAM (formerly 512 MB) and a 1.6 GHz processor. It was runs XP, but my friend booted mine from an external one running Vista because he show me it. It looked pretty sweet, but I did some research and found out that Vista was glitchy, and that Windows 7 was better. Is 1.6 GHz enough to get fairly good performance out of 7 or should I get a faster computer or a patch?
When life gives you lemons, make orange juice and let them wonder how you did it.
I'm running 7 on a 3 year old 2ghz Core2Duo and it can get a bit laggy. I'd wait with whatever you have now and get 7 for your next computer. I haven't tried turning all the effects off, it'd probably be a lot better then.
It's apparently not superb but works. If Vista ran then 7 should beat its pants off. (Vista wasn't necessarily buggy, it just had design choices people didn't like. 7 uses the same kernel.)
Dr. James, it seems weird that it would lag much on a 2ghz C2D. I'm running Vista on a 1.6Ghz C2D and it's never slow. (Though it was a bit before I installed 3GB of RAM.)
I'm just comparing it to XP and Snow Leopard on the same machine. 2ghz C2D, 3gb ram, x1600. Vista was terrible on it and Win 7 is better, but when running apps on the internal or external drives it will sometimes stutter and hang for a second (this is on 2 identical spec machines so it's not an individual fault). On the gaming rig I built over the summer I get no problems at all though! Runs very well on that.