help with PC...

[juansolo]

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'.

[Toe-Knee]

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

[Roobubba]

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.

[HTH AMPS]

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?

[Toe-Knee]

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.

[juansolo]

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.

[Roobubba]

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 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.

[juansolo]

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.

[38thBeatle]

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.

[Toe-Knee]

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.

[HTH AMPS]

Thanks for that Roo - saved for a later date (when I have cash to splash).

[puma_21]

Virtual clone drive is pretty easy for cloning and I think it's free..

[Nez]

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.

[Modular1]

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.

[Roobubba]

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!