[HarpMan]

My Mini9 is an old friend. I don't like my fingers on a new-fangled tablet screen. I have upgraded the Mini with a 32 GB Runcore SSD a few years back and now I want to upgrade to a Runcore 64 GB SSD, which I just ordered. I know the legacy XP OS will no longer be supported in early 2014, so I want to upgrade to Win7. I don't know if win8 is compatible, nor do I really want it after reading about it. There is a lot of confusing info around on a clean install of Win7 on a mini9. Most of it is 3 or 4 years old now. So to cut through the fog for me, can someone tell me what should I buy to legally and hassle free convert to Win7 at this point in time. I see "System builder" win7 packages still out there, but I am wary of what that entails. I also see SP1, but does that lead to an infinitude of updating that could fail along the way? Thank you.

[holmes4]

Win8 works fine - as does Win7. Just install it. Buy a retail version (a "System Builder" version is fine) and install from DVD or use one of the many tools to copy a DVD to a bootable USB drive. You will need some drivers which you can still find at the Dell site - see various posts in Windows 7 Guides

If you choose Win8, you'll probably want Start8 or one of the other ways of restoring the regular Start menu. Win 8.1 works too - that's what I'm running now.

[atgw]

amazing stuff BUT whats the min spec to run 7 and whats the best? eg RAM & HDD + ??

[holmes4]

Minimum would be 1GB RAM, 2GB is better. As for HDD, I would recommend at least 32GB. I run 8.1 on my Mini 9.

[rtrt]

Hi Steve

Re the 32G recommendation - would it be possible to install Windows 10 or even 8 on a 16G Mini 9 with 2G RAM?

I currently have 10.5.8 Mac OS and I suppose an alternate would be to go to 10.6.X, if Mac OS would be faster than Windows.

My thought re Windows instead of Mac OS, is that it would just be easier to get it installed and fully working compared to Mac OS, plus of course it's supported with updates from MS etc.

But i'd say most important to me would be the best performing OS & basic apps. Music, Video, Web etc.

I appreciate 16G is very tight, whichever way I go, I'd still use the SD slot + USB ports for storage.

Great to see the site still here and actively running btw.

rt

[holmes4]

It's possible, I guess. Windows 10 has a 16GB minimum free disk space requirement, so you should be able to do that. How much else you can do, I don't know, but you could do compression of the disk (would slow it down, but that's how Dell originally shipped these). You'd have to be very careful with what you installed (Windows doesn't like installing programs to removable storage.)

I currently have Win10 on my Mini9, but I have a 64GB SSD.

[rtrt]

Thanks Steve. Good to know you have 10 installed.

I'd very much like a bigger boot disk, but looking at prices on ebay/amazon just now, i'd not want to put so much money into a new disk at this late stage.

Application location is a trade off I hadn't thought about- hmm.

I wonder if I clone Mac OS to a USB stick and install Win 10 to the internal Disk I could effectively dual boot for a while and see how I get on.

Whether I'd clone 10.5.8 or upgrade to 10.6.X I'm not sure. If I remember correctly when Apple launched 10.6, it was a release that largely focussed on under the hood improvements, rather than lots of additional functionality. Implying that it maybe runs better than 10.5.8.

With your Mini 9 experience, do you feel any one of 10.5.8, 10.6.X or Windows 10 is significantly more efficient than the other 2?

————————

Do you mind if I ask how much space your Win 10 install took up?

[holmes4]

I have not run OS X on my Mini 9 for several years. I would not choose based on "efficiency" - there isn't that much difference in that regard. Linux probably has a bit lower overhead, but also of course lower functionality.

I don't remember if one can run 10.6 on the Mini 9.

[rtrt]

Thanks Steve.

I'd thought about Linux and its usefulness on lower spec hardware, but ruled it out both for the reason you say and because I suspected that it may be closer to Mac OS in terms of effort expended to install - tweaking and so on.

I think 10.6 is ok with a few tweaks but the key point that I take from your post is the efficiency one. I think thats steered me more towards Windows 10. I'll take a look at installing it on the weekend I think.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

[rtrt]

Quick update - had some time yesterday evening so went ahead early.

Installed Win 10 and the free disk space after running update and deleting various files via disk cleanup is 4G. Pretty much where I expected.

Looks like there's a recovery partition of 450M, though it's 100% free so not sure if thats functional.

I've seen some things on google about ccleaner, as something else to look at to recover more space - though I have to admit I'm a little wary.

I'll carry on looking around for ways to recover disk space.

My external screen was in another room, so I made use of MS Remote access from a Mac and got a pleasant surprise.

MS have set it so that the resolution is that of the Mac remoting in and not as Apple do, where the resolution shown is the machine being remoted into. The benefit being that I got a 1680x1050 screen to work with, whilst I had multiple windows open.