Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum
At The Back => The Dressing Room => Topic started by: HTH AMPS on August 02, 2012, 01:45:01 AM
-
Ok guys, I've got a Sony Vaio laptop thats around 6 years old and it's getting to the stage where it takes a good ten minutes before I can start using it, even then the windows take a good ten seconds to respond to mouse-pad clicks.
Essentially, I want to get it back to somewhere approaching the speed and response when it was new.
Any ideas?
-
It's quite hard to say without seeing it in person as there could potentially be lot that could be done that's not too drastic.
Have you checked for spyware, registry errors and just had a general cleanup?
Or if you want the sure fire way back up everything that's important. Format the hard drive and reinstall.
The latter is generally a lot quicker and essentially gives you a fresh start so to speak.
-
IT costs money but Spinrite is worth a look. If the slowness is comeing from a slow, dodgy-sectored hard drive then a good does of Spinrite can work wonders.
-
When computers get this bad I tend to just format them/reinstall windows and it seems to do the trick!
-
i would agree with the reinstall option.
if you can't be arsed to back it up, then buy a new hard drive and put the old one in a £20 USB caddy so you can pull stuff off it later.
-
I don't have all of the discs for the software - it came pre-installed. There is an option to set the laptop back to 'factory specs', but I'm not sure how much good that would do.
I've checked for spyware, defragged and generally got rid of anything in the startup that isn't required.
How do I check for registry errors?
How about a rundown on 'general cleanup' - my PC skills ain't all that great.
Cheers to all that have replied.
-
The restore to factory settings should format and reinstall.
it will be like you just got the laptop.
You've done a good portion of the cleanup yourself.
Registry errors can be a bit tricky and can do more harm than good if you don't really know what you are doing.
I'd be tempted to try the factory reset in your position
-
I'm not too technical but have somehow ended up being the pc guy at work. We had a couple of PC's running slow and was pointed in the direction of this site;
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/drammemory.aspx?gclid=CM7Qqd_nybECFSQhtAodJHsAUA&cpe=pd_google_uk&ef_id=-UxOCOWLESAAAE7E:20120802204455:s (http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/drammemory.aspx?gclid=CM7Qqd_nybECFSQhtAodJHsAUA&cpe=pd_google_uk&ef_id=-UxOCOWLESAAAE7E:20120802204455:s)
They have a scanner that will tell you what you need and its a piece of the proverbial to fit.
Cheers
Roy
-
Here's a radical suggestion - clean the dust out of it. My PC regularly overheats then slows to a crawl because the CPU fan gets clogged with dust. Dismantle, unclip CPU cooler, remove a mat of dust thick enough to serve as William Shatner's stunt wig, reassemble, works at full speed again.
-
I really should have thought about the cleaning thing....
It just comes automatically to me but I did waste two years of my life doing ICT A levels.
-
I don't have all of the discs for the software - it came pre-installed. There is an option to set the laptop back to 'factory specs', but I'm not sure how much good that would do.
I'm glad you asked that question! :lol:
Last time I bought a PC, it came with the Windows XP disc (yes, it was that long ago), and I know they don't provide discs any more. I've been wondering how it's possible to do a clean install.
-
I don't have all of the discs for the software - it came pre-installed. There is an option to set the laptop back to 'factory specs', but I'm not sure how much good that would do.
I'm glad you asked that question! :lol:
Last time I bought a PC, it came with the Windows XP disc (yes, it was that long ago), and I know they don't provide discs any more. I've been wondering how it's possible to do a clean install.
Some have a program installed that will do it and most have a button you can press when you first power up (usually F3 or F9) and it will load the installers from a hidden partition on the hard drive.
It works surprisingly well and really does return it to exactly how it was when you first turned it on.
-
Only thing is, I also don't have the discs for putting the broadband software back on or any of that stuff. Same with getting the laptop to recognise the wireless router - I seem to recall that was a pain in the arse job to do as well. I should just get a longer ethernet cable and run it from the cable modem as I typically only use my laptop in bed now to watch films (and surf the BKP forum).
Think I'll go with the cleanup options and the dusting and use the factory reset as a last ditch solution.
Cheers guys 8)
-
Only thing is, I also don't have the discs for putting the broadband software back on or any of that stuff. Same with getting the laptop to recognise the wireless router - I seem to recall that was a pain in the arse job to do as well. I should just get a longer ethernet cable and run it from the cable modem as I typically only use my laptop in bed now to watch films (and surf the BKP forum).
Think I'll go with the cleanup options and the dusting and use the factory reset as a last ditch solution.
Cheers guys 8)
If all else fails you can contact your ISP and they should send you out a new modem/router that's plug and play or at the very least a replacement disc.
Your router you can always download drivers using Ethernet.
-
The single best thing you can do to any computer is change out the hard disk drive for a solid state drive (SSD). Especially now, as the prices have been steadily dropping over the last 18 months, and have stabilised recently.
I recently did this to a 6-year old Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo 1718 (a cr@p laptop when it was made!, 1GB RAM and a slow Pentium4-based processor). It had got to the point where it was barely usable, and very frustrating. Once I'd put in a £45 60GB Samsung SSD, it now flies for all the usual laptop stuff - web browsing, some office applications, streaming video either from BBC or over the network. The boot time is stupidly short, as are the sleep and wake-from-sleep times.
It can be a a pain to get your data from a large HDD to a smaller SSD, but there are places online that are very helpful, provided you can still get online (ie is it your only computer, or can you browse on another machine/phone etc).
It's worth having an external USB disk that's large enough to write all the data you intend to copy (if it's an HDD, this won't be an issue!), and a 2GB+ USB stick to put on the bootable software to enable you to clone the drive. I can dig out the links I used if you decide to go down this route, they were very helpful!
-
Ok guys, I've got a Sony Vaio laptop thats around 6 years old and it's getting to the stage where it takes a good ten minutes before I can start using it, even then the windows take a good ten seconds to respond to mouse-pad clicks.
Essentially, I want to get it back to somewhere approaching the speed and response when it was new.
Any ideas?
This is a 'feature' of the OS sadly.
Flatten it and re-install windows.
Another option would be to switch to a Mac. Which doesn't do this, but has a different set of slightly less annoying 'features'.
-
Id also consider upgrading to windows 8.
Its currently free for the "evaluation" version. I've been running it for a few months now and it boots in seconds and everything is a lot snappier.
I haven't had a single crash yet and it actually has better legacy support for older software.
The only downside of it is the Metro UI but it's not as bad for me as it is others as I have a touchscreen PC.
I'm very impressed though at how fast & stable it is overall and the fact that the full version is only £14.99 if you have a valid windows 7 licence is a bonus. I think it's £25 otherwise
-
My experience with Apples has been diabolical. Through work I've had 2 macbook pros, 2 mac pros and an iMac (still to arrive). The mac pros are slow and overpriced. One of them just died (hard disk fail, after 3 years isn't great but it does happen to be fair).
The macbook pros have been shockingly poor. My first macbook pro had a keyboard/mouse failure related to the battery. It also crashed a lot (like at least once a week, BSOD-level crash). The replacement one is only just over a year old, and has been back to Apple twice already, they've replaced almost every component. It recently died a third time (unbootable, or sometimes boots then crashes horribly before/after login). It needs to go back to Apple again. It also had a bad screen - I can't really describe the effect, but washing out of the corners gets close - but it was gravitationally affected. If I left the computer at an angle with the top edge of the screen pointed down, the top edge would be washed out. After half an hour, it would be the bottom edge washed out. Very odd.
So my 2p on this is: don't buy Apples! They are expensive, slow (easily outperformed by any of my home machines which cost 1/4-1/3 of the price), and unreliable, both in terms of crashing and poor consistency of build quality. If you're lucky, you may never have these problems, but I'm not the only person I know who have found Macs to be completely cr@p.
-
How do I clone a drive Roo?
Basically I only use the laptop for watching films in bed, not for porn, as if, sheesh! :lol:
That idea of the SSD drive sounds doable - I'm up for doing that. Is it a ball-breaker to install a new HDD in a laptop?
-
My experience with Apples has been diabolical. Through work I've had 2 macbook pros, 2 mac pros and an iMac (still to arrive). The mac pros are slow and overpriced. One of them just died (hard disk fail, after 3 years isn't great but it does happen to be fair).
The macbook pros have been shockingly poor. My first macbook pro had a keyboard/mouse failure related to the battery. It also crashed a lot (like at least once a week, BSOD-level crash). The replacement one is only just over a year old, and has been back to Apple twice already, they've replaced almost every component. It recently died a third time (unbootable, or sometimes boots then crashes horribly before/after login). It needs to go back to Apple again. It also had a bad screen - I can't really describe the effect, but washing out of the corners gets close - but it was gravitationally affected. If I left the computer at an angle with the top edge of the screen pointed down, the top edge would be washed out. After half an hour, it would be the bottom edge washed out. Very odd.
So my 2p on this is: don't buy Apples! They are expensive, slow (easily outperformed by any of my home machines which cost 1/4-1/3 of the price), and unreliable, both in terms of crashing and poor consistency of build quality. If you're lucky, you may never have these problems, but I'm not the only person I know who have found Macs to be completely cr@p.
I have had very similar experiences. I wont buy any more apple products after being burnt a few times.
However I have ran OSX on a self built PC and it ran flawlessly until I got bored of being so restricted with what I could do so went back to windows within a few months.
-
Pretty much the opposite of my experience. Been running them for years (since OS8). Usually Powermacs. Though when the last one expired (after 7 years continuous use the PSU gave up the ghost), I switched to a mini server. Which is what I run everything on. Not as quick as the outgoing powermac, but totally up to what I use it for (regular web stuff, a bit of serving, Photoshop and some video encoding).
What I used to like was that I could sell my Powermacs a few years down the line and still get good money for them. Hell even the one that broke I stripped and it paid for the mini and left me a few hundred up.
As my day job is (was) an AIX technical specialist, I'm was more at home on power kit running UNIX than windows :) Though I do have a PC, I hardly ever turn it on mind you and when I do I have to wait 30 mins or so for it to patch the shite out of itself... Windows 7 ain't bad though. Certainly the best thing MS have turned out in a long, long time.
-
Physically installing an SSD is easy peasy in the vast majority of laptops. It's usually one or two screws holding in the HDD bay, which then has a further 2-4 screws holding the disk into the holder. The tricky part is before that making sure that you've cloned the disk onto a separate disk (usually USB unless you have another computer with some free hot swap bays to make things quicker). Here's the website I used for cloning a larger drive onto a smaller drive. It took a couple of attempts because I was stupid about a couple of things :)
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=670079
If the SSD you buy is the same physical size or larger compared with the current HDD (unlikely), then most of this doesn't matter. Clonezilla is a great piece of software, definitely worth using for this! I believe Norton Ghost has the ability to do most of this, but it's not freeware software like all of the programs referred to in the above post.
Juansolo: I agree with the sentiment that *nix systems are fundamentally better than windows! I recently put together a NAS/webserver box with freeBSD, and it's awesome! Very cheap, too, and it gives me 3TB of redundant storage using ZFS and it's backed up nightly to a friend's identical system in a different town. I wouldn't dream of doing that on a windows machine! I do really object to Apple's approach to hardware, though - it's all intel stuff but they chip it so you have to pay over the odds for the same thing! It was interesting to see that in the mobile device market: according to Hexus, Apple shifted 6% of mobile devices and milked 77% of the profit (http://hexus.net/mobile/news/general/43449-apple-ships-6-mobile-devices-milks-77-market-profits/) in the sector. Great for them, terrible for their customers if you ask me!
I do know several people who swear by Apple products. Lucky them, is all I can say! My experiences haven't been so glowing.
-
Only ever had two Intel macs (the two current ones, though one is a first gen mini and is still going strong, touches wood)... All the old IBM/PPC ones were built like tanks. Sadly I've got to agree that the Intel ones just aren't :(
...and yeah, Apple tax can be hard to swallow at times. At least I tend to get quite a few years out of mine so it doesn't hurt too much.
-
I need toi get a new PC soon for various reasons and I am kind of holding on for Windows 8 to be released but I have no idea if that is a good plan or not.
-
I need toi get a new PC soon for various reasons and I am kind of holding on for Windows 8 to be released but I have no idea if that is a good plan or not.
It's a good plan! Windows 8 is everything that 7 was but faster and more stable with better backwards compatability.
The only downside is the metro UI but you can skip straight past that and go to the good old familiar desktop.
However if you buy a new PC with windows 7 before the windows 8 launch you get a decent discount on windows 8 as you fall within the 1 year upgrade time band.
I think the launch is the beginning of October or something like that. I imagine the prices of windows 7 PCs will be fairly cheap in the run up to the launch.
-
Thanks for that Roo - saved for a later date (when I have cash to splash).
-
Virtual clone drive is pretty easy for cloning and I think it's free..
-
The thing you've got to realise is that older PC's are using outdated hardware. When you pressure it to perform tasks of today, it can be quite overwhelming for the computer which causes it to perform very slow. As Windows updates, it adds to things to the PC that sometimes won't work all that great with old hardware. Think of games for example: Something like Call Of Duty won't work on a computer from a couple years ago as good as it would today.
-
If its an older well used computer I have to concur with Gwems first post. Hard drive is probably going to be the first component that fails so get a new one in there and put a fresh os on it. Dont be tempted to put the latest version of windoze on it because it might not run that well on an older machine. Sick to the one that came on the machine.
-
Actually, windows 7 (and I'm told to a greater extent windows 8 but have not tried this myself) run particularly well on older hardware. Even a knackered old machine I put vista on for a laugh runs it comfortably once you've put an SSD in there. Of course, if you already have the windows disk that you've bought (or the reinstaller that comes with your machine for an older version of windows) then there's often not much point in shelling out for a new version if it's not really necessary!
-
Is it just vista runs like a bag o sht then? I wish I'd never put on on my old mans machine. It used to run fine with xp on and it's certainly not a badly specced pc.
-
the main thing that most people do is have too many programs installed, you also always need to clear the temporary files by using 'disk cleanup' this should make a big difference in the speed. You should really go through all your programs and get rid of almost all of them apart from the ones you really need, games are a real pain for slowing systems down especially when you have 10 games that are all large in size. The more RAM and higher clock speed the better too but only when the OS supports the extra power or it's useless.