The author of the NTDEV YouTube channel released the Windows 7 operating system, which was released in 2009, on a virtual machine with a 5 MHz processor and 128 MB of RAM. The minimum system requirements of the platform include a 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of memory.

The machine was configured on the 86Box emulator: The Pentium-S virtual processor, which initially offered 50 MHz, was reduced to 5 MHz by editing the source code, and combined with 128 MB of memory, Windows 7 Ultimate took 28 minutes to load. At the same time, the operating system retained its multitasking functions: in parallel with the program, which showed a processor frequency of 5 MHz, it was possible to launch Notepad and even print a line of text in it.

Enthusiast changed the boot configuration and even when normal boot mode was selected, the system booted in safe mode with most drivers disabled and showing all .SYS, .DLL and .EXE files as they booted. When Windows 7 was released, only three services were kept to conserve resources – even the login window that refused to display at frequencies below 50 MHz had to be sacrificed. To keep access to the command line, I had to modify the registry and put the system in “pseudo-OOBE” mode (OOBE – Outstanding Experience) and delete everything in the “c:\windows\system32\oobe” folder. .

The author of the project said that he started Windows 7 with a processor clock frequency of only 3 MHz, but its capabilities fell short for an interesting video. And the minimum amount of memory it started with was 36 MB, but enthusiasts chose 128 MB to avoid needing a paging file – in fact, the system only managed 70 MB. Currently trying to run Windows 10 or 11 on sub-1GHz chips. And 28 minutes to install Windows 7 is not a record: when it started Windows XP at 1 MHz and it loaded for 3 hours.