Windows 7 launched on a system with a 5 MHz processor and 128 MB of memory – it took 28 minutes to boot

YouTube channel author NTDEV ran Windows 7, released in 2009, in a virtual machine with a 5 MHz processor and 128 MB of RAM. The platform’s minimum system requirements are a 1GHz processor and 1GB of memory.

Image source: youtube.com

The machine was configured in the 86Box emulator: the Pentium-S virtual processor, which originally offered 50 MHz, was lowered to 5 MHz by editing the source code, and combined with 128 MB of memory, Windows 7 Ultimate took 28 minutes to boot. At the same time, the OS retained multitasking functions: in parallel with the program, which showed a processor frequency of 5 MHz, it was possible to launch Notepad and even print a line of text in it.

The enthusiast changed the boot configuration, and even when choosing “normal” mode at startup, the system started in “safe” with most drivers disabled and showing all .SYS, .DLL and .EXE files as it loaded. To save resources at startup, Windows 7 retained only three services – even the login window had to be sacrificed, which refused to appear at frequencies below 50 MHz. To save access to the command line, I had to change the registry and put the system into “pseudo-OOBE” mode (OOBE – Out Of the Box Experience), deleting everything in the “c:windowssystem32oobe” folder.

The author of the project said that he ran Windows 7 at a processor clock speed of only 3 MHz, but its capabilities were not enough for an interesting video. And the minimum amount of memory with which it started was 36 MB, but the enthusiast chose 128 MB so that a paging file was not required – in reality, the system cost only 70 MB. Now he is trying to get Windows 10 or 11 to work on chips with a frequency below 1 GHz. And 28 minutes to boot Windows 7 is not a record: he once ran Windows XP at 1 MHz and it took 3 hours to boot.

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