Youtuber tried booting Windows 7 with 200 times lower than the official minimum CPU requirement. After many tests they started but required half an hour to fully activate.
Youtuber NTDEV started experimenting with his machine, not by overclocking but by lowering its performance as much as possible. It reached the CPU at 5 MHz, in times that is around end of the 1970s.
Leaving a minimum memory, at 128 MB, by disabling LogonUI and running it on safe mode managed to boot Windows 7. And not only that, but as you will see below video managed to multitask with more than one program open at the same time.
The NTDEV job runs on a virtual machine running a Pentium-S clocked at 50MHz along with 128MB of RAM. Once Windows 7 is fully booted (a process that takes about 28 minutes), it is able to run programs such as Notepad and another that displays the current clock speed of 5 MHz. The YouTuber was even able to run the system with just 36MB of RAM, but doing so requires the use of the pagefile.
In case you're wondering, Microsoft recommends at least a 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage to run Windows 7. Predictably, the system is painfully slow, but it's not the slowest NTDEV has managed. He had succeeded before to run Windows XP at just 1MHz. That configuration took about three hours to start, he said.
