Speed up your old Donkey.

[fossyant]

Computer...

We have a mix of computers at home, but the main one for storing photo's is getting on, over 10 years old, but it was a good spec once upon a time......

Got it running Win 7 better than XP earlier this year, and upgraded to the last AGP Radeon graphics card for peanuts.

We have two new laptops that boot really fast and my lads gaming machine that boots of SSD and has a massive normal drive for stuff - that's silly fast. But the old clunker is used for banking etc, and not for kids stuff.

Well, took the plunge and got a Samsung Evo 850 SSD 240gb tonight for our old clunker (bit overkill but was cheap enough - £79)

Had one small job of swapping the drivers over (lack of support for an old computer) and then ran the Samsung software. 90 minutes later, it's swapped over and it's like on speed. Just switching from internet to word, loading programmes is so much faster.

Much cheaper than buying a whole new machine and copying over.

My wife might like this as she get's the 'my school dinner card has no money on it' - boot times are super fast now.

Great way of getting an old every day clunker going fast. If you aren't gaming, it's a cheap upgrade.

 

[fossyant]

With my motherboard, the main 'disc controller' didn't recognise the SSD (brown pants moment) but the second controller did. Whoop.

But..... re-enabling the second controller revealed there were no Win 7 drivers. Did a quick google, and Win 2003 server drivers work..

This is on an early SATA equipped computer where installing Win XP was a faff as it didn't yet support SATA. So a new SATA 6GB drive will work with an early 1.5GB SATA system OK. Makes a huge difference in speed, even if i's not running at full crank.

 

[I like Skol]

With my motherboard, the main 'disc controller' didn't recognise the SSD (brown pants moment) but the second controller did. Whoop.

But..... re-enabling the second controller revealed there were no Win 7 drivers. Did a quick google, and Win 2003 server drivers work..

This is on an early SATA equipped computer where installing Win XP was a faff as it didn't yet support SATA. So a new SATA 6GB drive will work with an early 1.5GB SATA system OK. Makes a huge difference in speed, even if i's not running at full crank.

You sort of lost me in the first few lines but I for one am all in favour of keeping the old stuff running where possible/practical.

 

[dan_bo]

Got sent a pc to upgrade on an instrument today....they sent us one of their old servers. This thing is huge- 48gig RAM.

I'll try and remember to put some pics up tomorrow. It's like that thing from superman III.

 

[fossyant]

You sort of lost me in the first few lines but I for one am all in favour of keeping the old stuff running where possible/practical.

It's like slap a new engine in it. You paid a fortune to get a 200 GB drive (2.0 engine) 10 years ago, but it's now a little tiddler 1.0 but with eco boost and goes like the clappers. You can get a normal drive that's 10 times the space (2000 or 2TB) for the same price, but stick one of these little beauties under the hood of your old clinker......

Think the Sierra XR4 - it was like a 2.8 engine with 150bhp.... you can get a washing machine with that now....

 

[I like Skol]

Think the Sierra XR4 - it was like a 2.8 engine with 150bhp.... you can get a washing machine with that now....

You can get a dieseasal of a similar size with 250bhp and loads more torque these days, but if/when it goes wrong you need a friendly bank manager to pay for the repair!

 

[swee'pea99]

I found an even easier way to get over the slow boot problem with my ageing PC - I never turn it off!

 

[steve50]

I found an even easier way to get over the slow boot problem with my ageing PC - I never turn it off!

leaving your pc on because it has started to boot slowly, a good indication that the hard drive is getting tired.

 

[dan_bo]

Look at the feckin size of that! The one on the left is a standard tower. The thing weighs a ton.

 

[Scoosh]

View attachment 109640

Look at the feckin size of that! The one on the left is a standard tower. The thing weighs a ton.

Is most of it fans ?

 

[dan_bo]

Is most of it fans ?

It sounds like a hovercraft on bootup. I'm expecting it to try and log on to my brain at some point.

 

[FrankCrank]

.....an SSD upgrade - absolutely best bang for the bucks

 

[Crackle]

Interesting Fossy. Might well upgrade to an SSD in the future. Just built this new one off internet bits and discovered one of the SATA controllers keeps crapping out. Took a while to figure as I thought it was the disk at first. Luckily it was the 2nd disk not the OS disk. I was looking to see if I could update the drivers to fix it but it's not easy to figure, so as this one works (for the moment) I might leave it. SSD sounds good though, a few people have said it makes a massive difference.

 

[swee'pea99]

leaving your pc on because it has started to boot slowly

I don't. I leave it on because I read somewhere once that it's less wearing on the kit as a whole to just stay on all the time (with power set to sleep everything after 15 min) than to switch off & on repeatedly. True or not I don't see a downside. And my 'boot up time' is about one second. The hard drive's brand new, as it happens. 320Gb WD, £20 including delivery. Job's a good'un.

 

[awomaninsane]

What a coincidence! I was just talking about my laptop yesterday, complaining that it takes hours to boot up and is too slow. It's about 6-7 years old and I have no idea what to do with it. I don't really want to just bin it so reading that you've made yours super speedy makes me want to fix mine. Someone suggested to do a factory reset, would that work? I am no techy and what you've described you did sounds too complicated for me!
Any advice for me- simple, simple advice please!