My laptop must be at least 6 years old now, running Windows7 (it was a Win Vista upgrade), but still reasonably spritely as I’ve never really loaded it and tend to keep up with defrags/ccleaner etc.
I’m just wondering if people think it’s worth signing up for the free Windows 10 and/or, with it being old, will it likely grind the laptop to a halt. I don’t want it to be any slower starting up/processing than it currently is. Specs are:

Theoretically, W10 is better on old hardware, so you should be fine.

Whether you’d want to, I don’t know. I’m agonising over that myself. I’ve pulled the trigger on the ‘register for the upgrade’ button so I’ve got the option, but whether or not I’ll go ahead I don’t know. I’ll probably hold off for a while on my primary machine.

Cheers, I’ve pressed the button then. 🙂

That’s the same spec as my primary machine which is also still running absolutely fine! I’m signed up too but whether I’ll bother applying the upgrade while W7 is still in support I don’t know. Like Cougar though, I won’t be in any rush, I’m happy to let the masses field test it first.

Yeah, I hadn’t even looked at the spec. It’s not wholly dissimilar to mine either. You’ll be reet.

If in doubt you can pick up a 2nd hard drive for £30-ish – pull out the old drive, keep it safe and put in a new one – install Windows 10 on it and see if it works OK for you.

Back up the image then you can go back.

cranberry – Member
If in doubt you can pick up a 2nd hard drive for £30-ish – pull out the old drive, keep it safe and put in a new one – install Windows 10 on it and see if it works OK for you.

Not sure if this will work as it’s an upgrade version not an install being sent round.

Windows 10 is faster than Windows 7 on my single-core machine with 2GB RAM so you should be fine spec-wise. The message that pops up in Windows asking you to register is just MS marketing so there’s no need to sign up to it now (or probably at all) if you don’t want to – you’ll have up to a year to upgrade.

I’ve had Win 10 running on my main development machine for several months and as it stands I wouldn’t install it on an end user machine – I’m still getting a heap of problems including several main stream peripherals not working (and for some reason it’s just stopped recognizing my iPad), so I would hold off on installing it til a few months after release when hopefully the bugs will be ironed out.

I’m running Windows 8.1 on my day-to-day machine and it seems comparable in speed.

When Windows 10 is released you’ll need to do an in-place upgrade to get the licence, then you can wipe the disk drive and install fresh if you want a clean system, so installing on another drive to save your current setup isn’t really an option.

It seems that there have been some changes to the information regarding licencing and activation of Windows 10 in the last few days:

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/06/23/microsoft_apologises_over_free_windows_10_confusion/

.. but as I read it, as long as you have a licence ( which will have come with your laptop ) then you will qualify for a free upgrade.

An alternative to doing a full install on a new drive is to backup your current system using TrueImage or something similar to another drive then installing Windows 10 over your current operating system.

Well windows 8.1 boots a LOT faster on my old laptop that windows 7 ever did.

Hopefully windows 10 will be similar.