Breathing some life into a laptop

[DCBassman]

I'd love to see the BIOS pages, I'm sure something is amiss in there somewhere...

 

[LCpl Boiled Egg]

You don't have two antivirus packages installed at the same time do you?

 

[aferris2]

Oooooooo! That's a bit quicker.
SSD installed and it took about 30 seconds to get windows up from a complete cold start. I think the limiting factor is my typing speed for the PIN.

@DCBassman the slow time of the clean install is probably the speed of that old disk. The benchmark app said it was good against what other people have had for the same disk.

More than happy with the SSD. Now just need to reinstall everything. I'm going for the complete clean install rather than clone the old disk to get rid of the cr@p that must be there.

 

[DCBassman]

You don't have two antivirus packages installed at the same time do you?

Doesn't explain why the clean install takes so long to boot.

 

[DCBassman]

Oooooooo! That's a bit quicker.
SSD installed and it took about 30 seconds to get windows up from a complete cold start. I think the limiting factor is my typing speed for the PIN.

@DCBassman the slow time of the clean install is probably the speed of that old disk. The benchmark app said it was good against what other people have had for the same disk.

More than happy with the SSD. Now just need to reinstall everything. I'm going for the complete clean install rather than clone the old disk to get rid of the cr@p that must be there.

Absolutely. Cleaner, the better.
The other thing is maintenance. After every update, usually at the end of the week, on each drive, run Disk Clean Up. On mechanical drives, defrag. On SSDs, ensure defrag is turned off. It will reduce its lifespan otherwise, and does zero good anyhow.

 

[aferris2]

I'd love to see the BIOS pages, I'm sure something is amiss in there somewhere...

Here you go

 

[aferris2]

Absolutely. Cleaner, the better.
The other thing is maintenance. After every update, usually at the end of the week, on each drive, run Disk Clean Up. On mechanical drives, defrag. On SSDs, ensure defrag is turned off. It will reduce its lifespan otherwise, and does zero good anyhow.

Yes, thanks. I know most that, but it's good to repeat for others to know about.
I've always kept documents etc on a different partition but the user accounts are always still on C: Is there any way of moving these too, or is it just a waste of time?

 

[HMS_Dave]

HDD's, especially the 2.5 inch drives are extremely fragile. There are moving parts and bearings which dry out. They are often in mobile and so droppable machines which are also more susceptible to heat soak, again bad for mechanical drives. Drives can and do get tired. Also, given the age the platters can and do develop bad sectors or even an entire area of a platter which windows disk management and onboard management will detect and disregard in future data use. This can cause data to be fragmented and slow down read times noticeably and considerably.

 

[Ming the Merciless]

PIO needs the cpu to do the data transfer from disc. What other transfer options are available?

 

[aferris2]

PIO needs the cpu to do the data transfer from disc. What other transfer options are available?

On the bios it's just IDE, AHCI, and RAID. I seem to remember there was a way of changing modes from Windows, but that was probably back in the XP or vista days and I haven't seen anything on win10. It's probably there somewhere, but I think it's all working now so I'm not going to delve any further

 

[DCBassman]

Here you go View attachment 584235

View attachment 584236

View attachment 584237

View attachment 584238

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View attachment 584240

Thanks for that, looks good, but as @Ming the Merciless points out, that pio looks suspect, something from the mists of time...

 

[Ming the Merciless]

On the bios it's just IDE, AHCI, and RAID. I seem to remember there was a way of changing modes from Windows, but that was probably back in the XP or vista days and I haven't seen anything on win10. It's probably there somewhere, but I think it's all working now so I'm not going to delve any further

The bios screen shot shows pio, can you not change it to more modern direct access methods?

 

[aferris2]

HDD's, especially the 2.5 inch drives are extremely fragile. There are moving parts and bearings which dry out. They are often in mobile and so droppable machines which are also more susceptible to heat soak, again bad for mechanical drives. Drives can and do get tired. Also, given the age the platters can and do develop bad sectors or even an entire area of a platter which windows disk management and onboard management will detect and disregard in future data use. This can cause data to be fragmented and slow down read times noticeably and considerably.

Any (well most - I'm sure there is an exception) mechanical disk is vulnerable to shock and things wearing out. We had a control system running on a PC back in the early days of the IBM AT (remember them?) that wrote data to the 20MB disk every minute of so 24/7. We wore several disks out on each system every year. They literally fell apart and we were left with just dust inside the casing. Things started to get better when we moved on to IDE disks.

 

[HMS_Dave]

Any (well most - I'm sure there is an exception) mechanical disk is vulnerable to shock and things wearing out. We had a control system running on a PC back in the early days of the IBM AT (remember them?) that wrote data to the 20MB disk every minute of so 24/7. We wore several disks out on each system every year. They literally fell apart and we were left with just dust inside the casing. Things started to get better when we moved on to IDE disks.

Yes and the old spin up noise. Like screaming banshees...

 

[aferris2]

The bios screen shot shows pio, can you not change it to more modern direct access methods?

You can't change them. Might be able to on a newer bios. There doesn't seem to be any update for this bios anyway, so will have to leave it. I think I can wait 30 seconds for the computer to start.