Speed up your old Donkey.

[steve50]

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!

A factory reset effectively wipes the hard drive and resets the computer back to "as new" condition, this will speed your laptop up somewhat but if the hard drive is starting to show signs of age it will not be as fast as it was when new.

 

[potsy]

Speed up you old Donkey

I thought for a minute that somebody had shouted that at you whilst you were cycling home

 

[Vapin' Joe]

A factory reset effectively wipes the hard drive and resets the computer back to "as new" condition, this will speed your laptop up somewhat but if the hard drive is starting to show signs of age it will not be as fast as it was when new.

And on a 6-7 year old computer you'll be installing updates from now till kingdom come.

 

[swee'pea99]

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!

If it's that old, it may have come with the Windows CDs. If so, the thing to do is backup anything you actually want to keep (probably by saving onto a memory stick); then format the hard drive and reinstall Windows. Google for 'how to's, but it's not difficult. And yes, when you've done that, you'll probably need to download & install a shedload of updates - just leave it running overnight. The end result will be a computer that's probably about as fast as when it was new.

 

[mybike]

Apparently one of the problems with an old hard disk is that it has a hard time correcting the errors, so running SpinRite on it will speed it up because it will fix the errors and rewrite the disk. If you bought it 9 years ago that is how long ago the domains on the disk were written and they may well have faded.

 

[fossyant]

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!

With a laptop especially one that's not as old as our pc. You buy the ssd and a usb upgrade cable (usb to sata). Stick the drive into the usb with the cable, run the migration software, when done pop back off laptop, swap drive and jobs a good en.

 

[ianrauk]

With a laptop especially one that's not as old as our pc. You buy the ssd and a usb upgrade cable (usb to sata). Stick the drive into the usb with the cable, run the migration software, when done pop back off laptop, swap drive and jobs a good en.

Oooh, may just give that a go with an older, now going slow, laptop I have sitting about.

 

[fossyant]

Oooh, may just give that a go with an older, now going slow, laptop I have sitting about.

You can get a 120gb SSD from £35. Some come with the upgrade kit which is useful for - you don't need that with a desktop, but you will need the mounting brackets. So long as it is a SATA connection you'll be OK.

We popped a 240gb into the old computer with a 240gb standard drive already in. My lads gaming machine has a 240gb SSD for all the windows/office stuff, and the games are on a 2TB standard drive. It certainly is the fastest way of making a machine rather nippy again for general work and browsing.

 

[I like Skol]

Continuing on from Fossy's speed quest, my laptop has been a bit slow and clunky of late. I just noticed the C drive was getting close to full with about 8 or 9 gig left from 177 and was highlighted red. There is also a partitioned D drive which appears to be almost untouched with a total capacity of 265 gig.
As a short term fix I have moved all my films and photos off the C drive to an external HD. I have also placed a copy of the photo file in the D drive just in case the external HD gets trashed. This has moved about 80 gig from the C drive but has left me with some questions that I am hoping the techy guys and gals on cycle chat can help me with...

1. Why is my drive partitioned into C & D and why is the unused D (265GB) so much bigger than C (177GB)?
2. Is it a bad idea to use D to store a back-up of my precious photos in addition to having them off the laptop on the external storage?
3. What the heck is still taking up 93GB on my C drive? there are no films and relatively few image files. Music library is about 5GB. On the C drive the biggy seems to be the WINDOWS folder at a bit over 40GB! Surely the Windows operating system can't be that bloated can it? Within that folder there is a winsxs folder at 20GB, system32 at 3.3GB and sysWOW64 at 1.1GB. Is this all normal?

Plan now is to use the drive tools to do a disc clean up, then check for errors then a defrag. Not sure what is the best order to do these in or if it matters? Without doing any hardware upgrades is there anything else I should do that isn't too drastic but will make the computer work better?

If you don't hear fro me for the next few weeks you will know that I have screwed it up

 

[I like Skol]

BUMP! Any comments on the above points?

I have since also ran Malwarebytes anti-malware and Ccleaner. It appears I have previously set-up SpywareBlaster and this is always running in the background. The Malwarebytes found nothing and Ccleaner found a small number of files that could be deleted (a couple of hundred MB). Still puzzled about how the Windows file can be 40GB. This can't be right can it?

 

[mybike]

BUMP! Any comments on the above points?

I have since also ran Malwarebytes anti-malware and Ccleaner. It appears I have previously set-up SpywareBlaster and this is always running in the background. The Malwarebytes found nothing and Ccleaner found a small number of files that could be deleted (a couple of hundred MB). Still puzzled about how the Windows file can be 40GB. This can't be right can it?

Just checked the Windows folder on my XP virtual machine. It's about 2GB and has all the Windows Update uninstall directories. I suspect it could get rather big on a =<Win7 machine.

 

[Crackle]

Continuing on from Fossy's speed quest, my laptop has been a bit slow and clunky of late. I just noticed the C drive was getting close to full with about 8 or 9 gig left from 177 and was highlighted red. There is also a partitioned D drive which appears to be almost untouched with a total capacity of 265 gig.
As a short term fix I have moved all my films and photos off the C drive to an external HD. I have also placed a copy of the photo file in the D drive just in case the external HD gets trashed. This has moved about 80 gig from the C drive but has left me with some questions that I am hoping the techy guys and gals on cycle chat can help me with...

1. Why is my drive partitioned into C & D and why is the unused D (265GB) so much bigger than C (177GB)?
2. Is it a bad idea to use D to store a back-up of my precious photos in addition to having them off the laptop on the external storage?
3. What the heck is still taking up 93GB on my C drive? there are no films and relatively few image files. Music library is about 5GB. On the C drive the biggy seems to be the WINDOWS folder at a bit over 40GB! Surely the Windows operating system can't be that bloated can it? Within that folder there is a winsxs folder at 20GB, system32 at 3.3GB and sysWOW64 at 1.1GB. Is this all normal?

Plan now is to use the drive tools to do a disc clean up, then check for errors then a defrag. Not sure what is the best order to do these in or if it matters? Without doing any hardware upgrades is there anything else I should do that isn't too drastic but will make the computer work better?

If you don't hear fro me for the next few weeks you will know that I have screwed it up

Your C and D drive are both the same disc, so saving pictures to D is the same as saving them to C in terms of backing up data. I.e. if the disk fails you still lose them and there isn't really any gain in performance from separating your files. So back your photos up either to a separate drive or use Google Drive or Windows Onedrive, both of which can reside on your PC but back the files up to the cloud at the same time or both, depending on how much data you've got.

Windows system size could be many things from original software that came with the PC installed by the manufacturer, so you might have a complete restore folder of the whole system, to old versions of Windows if you upgraded, to lots of user data held in application files. Try a disk cleanup to get rid of some. My own Windows 10 installation is around 50Gb without any data and the old windows version deleted.

 

[fossyant]

Which Windows is it on. If you are 7 and above then there will be the install files there for Windows 10.

Have a look at what's running also and un-install anything you don't need.

You might want to shift some files over to the D partition. You may have left over service pack update files too - these need deleting

 

[mybike]

Which Windows is it on. If you are 7 and above then there will be the install files there for Windows 10.

Have a look at what's running also and un-install anything you don't need.

You might want to shift some files over to the D partition. You may have left over service pack update files too - these need deleting

I wondered if Win 10 might be the culprit. Haven't seen an example tho'

Just checked my Win7 virtual m/c & that is 24GB

 

[fossyant]

I wondered if Win 10 might be the culprit. Haven't seen an example tho'

Just checked my Win7 virtual m/c & that is 24GB

If you aren't planning to upgrade, you can get the folder deleted.

In Win 7 if you delve into the disc options you can select various options to remove old service pack files etc. etc. Saved quite a number of GB when I last ran this.