Windows 7 Pro on a Pentium 4 desktop? Doable?

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The shop that sold me a refurb with 2 P4 processors now says they won't upgrade it from XP Pro because P4s don't work and play well with 7, and other people have complained about slowness.

This means I'm on my own with 2 days to go until XP support goes byebye.

Is it true that there's a problem with 7 (Pro) and P4 processors?

Any suggestions on my next step?

The refurb price was fairly low, so I don't want to pay big bucks for an upgrade...better to just get a W7 refurb.

Still, it's a good machine and I hate to waste it.

Again, any ideas?

Yes get a copy of Linex. For example
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop
You can burn a dvd/cd and give it a try in live mode.

Okay. Will this let me still run an old Adobe program called Photo Deluxe? It's why I'd had 7 Pro with its XP mode in mind. (Seems it won't run on 8 at all.)

If you decide to give Linux a go, you could try running it in Wine. It's an older application so it may not work that well. Is there any reason why you can't use a newer application? Perhaps a Gimp would work?

Ummm...

What's a Gimp?

GNU Image Manipulation Program, is an open source image editing software available on various platform, including Linux and Windows.

I've downloaded Gimp, but it'd be a big learning experience. (Haven't figured out how to even crop a new element before adding it as a new layer...and have tried.)

I'm guessing Wine is some type of Windows emulator, the way some people run Windows inside a Mac OS? Is it free like the rest of Linux is? Or do you have to have a Windows OS disc to add to the Linux installation?

Last edited by Sethno on 07 Apr 2014, 5:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I tried it too and gave up for the same reason. I wanted to create a Windows Icon using a JPG as a base for it, but couldn't figure out how to set the pallet transparency in any useful sort of way. It appears to have a very steep learning curve, so probably need to start playing around with single layer images before trying more complex image creation.

I still use an old XP version of Paint Shop Pro which meets most of my image manipulation needs, except for icon creation, but I found a website that does that free of charge.

Both Windows 7 and 8 work on Pentium 4 (and even some Pentium 3) computers. Just deactivate Windows Aero.

If you're going with Linux, try Mint. Ubuntu uses a frontend called Unity, which is painfully slow on old hardware—and the OS itself feels very half baked and unfinished. Most of the mistakes in Ubuntu, have been corrected with Mint. Please bear in mind that WINE won't run advanced graphic tools (3DS Max, Photoshop, etc.) particularly well, though (but it can run several games).

GIMP is not that good for photo manipulation, but it's still excellent for drawing with a tablet.

It's a similar learning curve with Photoshop, until you find your way around the mass of things it can do.

Jpeg doesn't support transparency - only gif and png.
To create an image with a transparent background in GIMP (and as far as I remember in PS too, which I can't get to just now) - File|New|Advanced Options|Fill with: Transparency.
Like PS, backgrounds can also be selected and removed by colour or other boundary selections of objects on it, so I'd start by creating a new transparent image and then copy/pasting part of the original source image into it - but either way, there's a learning curve with how to effectively select objects in GIMP and PS.

On the contrary, it's extremely effective and many of the controls involved with photo manipulation are the same as in Photoshop - but it is not Photoshop.
Sethno might want to google "gimp vs. photoshop" to get an idea - this seems a reasonable take on it (among many more):
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/16 ... -photoshop
Or this pdf, comparing features:
http://dl.meetthegimp.org/GIMP_vs_PS_r2.pdf

What I can do with my old paint shop pro is take a jpg and drop the image to 256 colours, assign one to be transparent then resave as a gif. The downside is that the low colour resolution can create visible ripples in the image. I'd like to save as PNG with a transparency, however, my version of paint shop pro doesn't support them. My route at the moment if I want a Windows Icon with a transparency is to take jpg > convert to gif and set transparency > save to gif file > use a free file converter on the internet to create the ico file. I'd really like to take a jpg and end up with a png with transparency for conversion to ico.

From the "glorious, photo-realistic" type:
http://gimp-tutorials.net/How-to-make-a ... -a-picture
...to the fancy (and probably laborious) "draw it yourself" type:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Creating_Icons/
...to the "rough description":
http://www.ehow.com/how_5876097_create- ... -gimp.html

Minor errors, possibly due to recent changes made to GIMP: instead of "Save As" an icon file, it should be "Export the icon using the ICO file extension" = File|Export|Microsoft Windows icon (*.ico)

Thanks Cornflake; I'll give that a go sometime in the near future.

For Linux with that particular machine, I'd go with a distro/desktop environment that is lighter than the regular Mint install. You might want to look for LinuxMint with the XFCE desktop, or perhaps Debian with either XFCE, or LXDE. Another workaround to get something similar to this but with media player and flash plugins already installed would be to install Crunchbang Linux which is very lightweight and based on Debian Stable, and then retoactively install either LXDE or XFCE.

Crunchbang uses the Openbox Windowmanager, which is the WM that LXDE uses along with the Thunar File Manager, which is the File Manager for XFCE.

What is "Wine" and how does it work? Does it just simulate Windows, or do you have to have a Windows disc and install that to run within Linux?