I have an old 2.4Ghz intel processor in this old computer of mine.

From this information I have gather from google.
I could run any windows OS meant for an x86 arch ever made.

question 1)
Did anybody ever run in to a situation when a processor wasn't at least the min requirments for an OS.
I would think that is pretty uncommon more common to need to upgrade memory or move to a bigger HDD then to upgrade a processor on the motherboard.

question 2)
Why does the OS fail to run on a slower processor. In theory, if you build a slow processor (< min req.) with the same instruction set would the OS still not work ? Or does something in the OS code fail if you don't have a high enough instruction processor execution? Curious I would think the only problem is it would still run but take years to do anything with if you had the same instruction set that the OS was made for.
Maybe I am overlooking something?

 

Theoretically you could have a processor that slow that it couldn´t serve interrupt requests in time and the OS´s drivers would fail because of that somehow, but that would be like a 20Mhz processor running windows XP, if it even is possible to make the drivers fail because of that.

Other than that, OS requirements for processor are more like recommendation of what is not horribly slow but just slow.
And by the way, 2.4Ghz single core is still pretty <snip> fast processor, I guess you don´t have the experience of running W2K on a 500MHz machine

 

So long as your processor runs in 32 bit mode there shouldnt be a problem.

2.5 Ghz isnt too bad.

 

So other then interrupt storms causing device/hardware issues
Brought on by an OS that needs faster execution of interrupts is their anything else that would cause an OS not to run on a processor.
(provided the ISA instruction set arch and machine code stuff is correct for the processor to interperate )

Seems so arbitrary the processor requirements their must be a reason why they set the min to those given numbers ? curious if anybody knows in depth.

Looking at the ISA for the i386 I would say the only commands that would effect an the hardware from not running a particular OS because of speed would be the interrupt commands or the out/in port reading/writting other then that I cann't see anything killing the os.

 

when i was a kid, my dad found a bunch of really really old laptops. dont remember what kind, but they were designed for win95. when i went to put win98 on them, it said the processor was to slow and aborted the setup.