HP Compaq NX9600 -- Adding Memory

Ed_Gee wrote:


I see this differently. That 75 pages was mostly a bunch of people trying to dink and tinker with old computers to make Windows 10 work ... and most of those cited were not as old as the Original Posters 15+ year old Laptop. Also, I cannot see anywhere in the OP's post where he spent $100. on his laptop.... it appears to be an old one he has always had .. Regardless, 15 years is well beyond good service and needs be retired. Windows 10 will almost certainly be slower than cold tar on that laptop, if it can be installed at all. Last year I purchased a completely refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad T410 laptop on Amazon for $160. ... with new battery. That was an Intel Core i5 with 16GB Ram. It is foolish to fuss with such an old Laptop such as OP's when such modern refurbished laptops can be had for such low prices. Admittedly, I see Amazon selling the T-410 now for $279. ....but there are others at lower price, if one only makes the effort to search. Gave up my IBM Thinkpad R52e years ago when it could no longer upgrade to Windows 8, even ... and that one was a P4 1.5GB Ram unit similar to the OP's. Of course if one wants to dink and tinker with that old stuff...more power to them ... maybe it will work ... albeit very slowly.... not my problem.

You didn't read all 75 pages, did you?

You obviously do not have the lets try and see if it works attitude either and perhaps time to bow out?

Like I prefaced before, I am generally all for reusing stuff, in some cases not so much. While this certainly is a case where if you want the top notch most sparkly brand spanking new laptop this is not for you, perhaps the OP wishes to learn and at the same time use something that others like you have discarded to the landfills.

Op has the laptop and was planning to drop Win7 on that laptop which originally has XP, that in of it's self is a real issue. As I have explained, MS HAS removed all legacy hardware drivers for ALL legacy OS versions below W10 from their main website. Once again this causes a real headache because starting with Win7 and continued forward with W8, W8.1 and yes W10 MS has stripped out a lot of drivers that USED to be present in the installer.

Double whammy is HP same as MS has become extremely hostile to old hardware and OS support.. Older hardware drivers are in executable files which are OS dependent to operate making getting to the INF files (which is all that is needed in most cases) a bit of a tall challenge.

In a nutshell, OP will find issues getting W7 to connect to MS Update website to find drivers for Win7 because it is no longer hosted there. This "feature" is embeded in the OS. The drivers have be relocated to a Archived website and even when you do access that website the drivers there POINT to the now missing original location.

That is how we got to the point I make that OP might be further ahead to attempt W10 install since you CAN use the Win7 license key to activate that install with a digital license AND with a little playing around most likely can sub in XP, Win2000 or existing Win7 driver INF files and get W10 to work fine.

I have my doubts that W10 is going to run like a slug, it IS a much lighter OS, it loads and runs fewer drivers in memory making for a more efficient OS than the OSs of the past.

So far, even though I am not a fan of W10, it IS an improvement over W8 and W8.1 for speed and those were slightly more efficient than W7.

There is zero harm in trying and especially since the OP HAS the laptop..

Perhaps the OP does not envision tossing $300-$400 worth of a recycled (aka refreshed) Laptop to a kid???