Actually, the minimum is really 800 MHz, so I guess its not impossible to
be running at 700 MHz. I remember some persons running the brutal early
builds on P3 600 MHz, but they had like 768 MBs of RAM, still not a lot,
but they got away with it.
I don't recall the stated minimum CPU speed but it wasn't an issue. The
minimum stated RAM was 256 MB at the time, I had 320 MB in that machine at
the time, and it was enough for the first four months of the attempted
install. Paging didn't become an issue until the installer had been running
for more than four months.
During the fifth or sixth month of the attempted install, a Microsoft
employee advised on how to discontinue the attempted installation of .Net
Framework 2 so that mscorsvw.exe might stop taking 100% of the CPU and maybe
the Vista install might finish. I did disable the attempted installation of
..Net Framework 2 and then CPU utilization dropped to near 0 but the
installation procedure for the rest of Vista did not proceed. I reenabled
..Net Framework 2, mscorsvw.exe jumped back up to 100% of the CPU, and then a
few days later the installer repeated events that it had done five months
earlier. At that point I gave up and killed it.
After reinstalling Windows 2000 and viewing the entire screen, the damage
became apparent. During the time that Vista's installer was displaying "Do
not restart your computer during this time", it was only displaying the
central 640x480 portion of the screen, so I didn't see that part of the
backlight had burnt out. Of course I had seen that part of the case had
melted, and pretty clearly that was from keeping the machine on for more
than five months without occasional hibernation, but I didn't know the
extent of the damage until after reinstalling Windows 2000. The machine was
long out of warranty even before I bought it, but Fujitsu agreed that the
case shouldn't melt and they fixed it.
When I have time to experiment with drivers again I'll put Windows XP
checked build on that machine, but Vista, forget it.
P