running w7 as limited

[nihil]

Replying to every post saying to use XP doesn't help at all.

It does; if they take the advice

XP is the most widely used and supported OS on this planet. It will most certainly run just fine on any hardware made in the last 5 years.

As for support.............that runs until January 2014, by which time Windows 8 will be on SP1

This machine is running Vista, which I had almost given up on; even though my first build was over 2x the Microsoft recommended minimum in all areas, AND I switched off all the eye candy!!!

This one scores 5.9/5.9 in all but the video, which is 5.0/5.9 (old NVIDIA 8500GT).

Much the same story with Windows ME....................I built my wife an ME machine years ago................an AMD Duron 1.3GHz with 512MB of PC133 SDRAM and a 64MB Radeon 7000. It ran stable for 3 years or more, which I suspect was due to the fact that it had more than 256MB of RAM?

EDIT:

For the record, nobody has replied to this thread or your "can't boot Windows 7" one and suggested that you install Windows XP.

This is not surprising given that both threads are clearly about Windows 7 and that solution is very much an early days of Vista one.

If you recall, Vista was late out and OEMs wanted to maximise holiday (Christmas) sales. They sold kit badged as "Vista capable" and "Vista ready" and gave you a voucher to get Vista when it was finally released.

The "Vista ready" kit was just fine and would run Vista with all its features. This was not the case with "Vista capable" machines that would boot the OS but not run most of the features that distinguished it from XP (Aero etc) and ran it slowly and clumsily.

The solution was to revert to XP if your hardware couldn't handle Vista properly. There are literally thousands of items on the internet about doing this.

Nobody would suggest loading XP in a Windows 7 environment unless it were to check for obscure hardware problems that prevent 7 from installing. Sure you can check booting with any bootable media and you can use Linux, but the problem with that is Linux can be too forgiving of hardware issues so you are best off using an XP or Vista CD/DVD