Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, December 27, you can't buy a new x86 processor that runs faster than 1GHz today. Most major desktop computers, CPU, have a basic clock rate higher than 2GHz. However, as early as the 1980s and 1990s, processors running at only a few MHz were common, and the original IBM PC itself had a clock rate of only 4.77MHz.

Can you run a modern Windows operating system on such a low clock rate CPU? The developer and YouTuber NTDEV have proved to be able to launch and use the Windows 7 flagship version of the 2009 Windows 7 system on a Pentium-S processor that has been downgraded to only 5MHz. This is a full 995MHz lower than the minimum 1GHz requirement for Windows 7. And the test system only has 128MB memory, which is much lower than the minimum 1GB memory requirement of Windows 7.

The video shows that the Windows 7 system is actually started by a virtual machine running in a 86Box simulator, starts a program with a clock speed of 5.00 MHz, and can even run notepad. It is worth mentioning that the Windows 7 system takes up to 28 minutes to start.

In order for Windows 7 to start and run in such a slow CPU, NTDEV said he had to disable a large number of system resources, which he did by running safe mode and disabling most drivers and services, so that only three services were running at startup, and he had to solve a problem with logonUI.

"the login screen (logonUI) doesn't want to load when the frequency is lower than 50MHz," NTDEV said. "so in order to get into a command prompt, I have to change the registry and delete everything in the c:\ windows\ system32\ oobe folder to put the operating system in a pseudo-OOBE state so that it doesn't load."

CTOnews.com noticed that the system desktop shown by NTDEV in the video has no start menu, no wallpaper, and the theme of the window itself is very simple, and in order to launch the WCPUID / Real-time clock Checker application, NTDEV must enter its shortcut name at the command prompt, as does startup notepad.

What's most impressive is that NTDEV can run four different programs at the same time: a command prompt, WCPUID, Winver (showing Windows version 7), and notepad with some text, so it's a fairly stable system environment.

NTDEV also claims that he has actually run Windows 7 at clock speeds as low as 3MHz, but not enough to make interesting videos. He said that in the past, he actually used only 36MB memory when running Windows 7, but used 128MB to make the sample system do not need page files (virtual memory), but the system actually used about 70MB in his demonstration.

Virtual machines also use much less storage space than the 16GB listed in the system requirements of Windows 7. NTDEV said that the entire installation process uses less space than 1GB, and the operating system's .wim file disk image is less than 350MB.

NTDEV says he is working on how to get Windows 10 or Windows 11 to run on a slower processor than 1GHz, and he has managed to get Windows XP to run at a speed that only has 1MHz.

He added that the 28-minute startup time of the Windows 7 system that the 5MHz processor was running was far from the slowest he had ever experienced. "it's nothing compared to the Windows XP that the 1MHz processor is running," he said. "it takes three hours for that thing to start!"

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