Developer Runs Windows 7 on a 5 MHz CPU with 128MB of RAM
fliptop writes:
The system takes 28 minutes to boot up but it can multitask:
Could one run a modern Windows operating system on a CPU with such a low clock speed? Developer and popular YouTuber NTDEV has proven that you can, booting and using Windows 7, which launched in 2009, on a Pentium-S processor that was downclocked to just 5 MHz. That's a full 995 MHz below the 2009-era OS's 1-GHz minimum requirement. The test system also had just 128MB of RAM, which is way short of Windows 7's 1GB minimum requirement.
In a YouTube video[...], NTDEV shows the system, which is actually a virtual machine running in the 86Box emulator[...], boot up into Windows 7 Ultimate, launch a program which shows its 5.00 MHz clock speed and even run Notepad. By the way, if you follow the sped-up time counter in the video, you'll note that it takes more than 28 minutes for the Windows 7 desktop to appear!
In the video, you can see NTDEV power on his virtual machine which POSTs as a Pentium-S running at 50 MHz with a 128MB of RAM. However, it has been downclocked to 5 MHz, a low speed which NTDEV told us he achieved by editing 86Box's source code.
[...] Now that he's gotten Windows 7 to run at 5 MHz (or even 3 MHz with less to do), NTDEV says he's looking at ways to get Windows 10 or Windows 11 to run on a processor that's slower than 1 GHz. He's already managed to get Windows XP to run at just 1 MHz[...].
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