Old laptop - Suggestions / advice

[matt_fsr]

OK so my laptop is ageing rather ungracefully, and is now behaving worse/slower than ever. Spec is:

Centrino 1.6Ghz single core
512Mb DDR RAM
60Gb 5200 RPM hard disk
Windows XP SP3, all updates, + AVG antivirus.

Last night, it was basically unable to run Firefox + Windows Live messenger at the same time, which largely means its unuseable. Surely though, when it was new in 2004, it handled browser+IM client+AV+Office etc fine? (I'm sure I remember it doing so, and indeed feeling only slightly slower than my desktop PC at the time!)

Am I just imagining it, or do things get slower over time? It's a fairly recent Windows rebuild, (~6 months old) and its fully defragged, and has eye candy turned off and TweakXP configured for everything to run as fast as possible. All drivers are up to date, and seemingly fine, no conflicts or crashes, just slow as an arthritic snail.

I'd put Linux on it, but the g/f uses it for Office from time to time, and needs proper Excel and Powerpoint functionality.

Anyone got any thoughts/bright ideas? What might be the most likely problem? I'm thinking of swapping to a different HDD and putting a fresh copy of TinyXP on it. Other than that, I'm short of ideas.

 

[Evil^]

I'm currently running ubuntu on a similar laptop to what your running, seems to keep up it has its obvious advantages however its for messing around on not for hard use, I have no idea what the stability of Office is under wine as I haven't had any reason to fault open office though its worth a shot

Edit: having a quick look at the winedb looks like there's no issues, installs fine and no performance issues

Wouldn't be out of your way to give it a try, download isn't big and installing it doesn't take long if your not fond of it though you could just stick the TinyXP thing on you mentioned

 

[eddyc]

Have you tried a clean install of the OS? In my experience reinstalling windows is generally the best thing you can do to improve speed (if it has not been done in a while).

Also 512MB of RAM will be limiting you. I would go for at least 1GB. 2GB would be even better.

A new HDD probably would improve speed but I am not sure that the laptop is worth it to be honest. Where the most basic of dual core laptops can happily run win 7 with a ram and HDD upgrade (and therefore will be good for web browsing and general office type tasks for the next couple of years) I would think that most single cores would struggle even with max RAM and a new HDD. But if you are desperate then a western digital caviar black or blue would be a good choice.

Also in CPU and RAM limited situations it is doubly important to make sure that there are no unwanted background processes running. Laptops tend to come with horrific amounts of bloatware and through use programs tend to add in even more startup items. There are various ways of blocking unwanted programs from starting on boot. I like ccleaner.

EDIT: Just reread your OP and I guess with tinyxp this will not be such a problem.

If I were you I would reinstall windows and buy at least another 512MB of RAM.

 

[matt_fsr]

I'm currently running ubuntu on a similar laptop to what your running, seems to keep up it has its obvious advantages however its for messing around on not for hard use, I have no idea what the stability of Office is under wine as I haven't had any reason to fault open office though its worth a shot

Edit: having a quick look at the winedb looks like there's no issues, installs fine and no performance issues

Am I reading that right as to that you've tried running MS Office under winedb and it works OK? I have installed Ubuntu before, and had a little play around but didnt try out wine features.

Ideally I don't want to spend much / anything on the machine, its' RAM is currently 2x 256Mb chips so I'd have to bin both of those if I wanted an upgrade.

 

[Evil^]

Am I reading that right as to that you've tried running MS Office under winedb and it works OK? I have installed Ubuntu before, and had a little play around but didnt try out wine features.

Ideally I don't want to spend much / anything on the machine, its' RAM is currently 2x 256Mb chips so I'd have to bin both of those if I wanted an upgrade.

I haven't as of yet but I will be doing shortly, according too the winedb though someone had it running fine (this being 2007) what version are you trying to get running?

(if its violating a rule then a mod remove it) but here is the link to the office winedb page http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=4992
If you take a look at the snips on there there's a screenie or two running power point, word, excel etc.

 

[sswats]

Just do a fresh install of windows
Disable some of the unused features in services.msc, and you should have a perfectly fine working laptop.

 

[matt_fsr]

Just do a fresh install of windows
Disable some of the unused features in services.msc, and you should have a perfectly fine working laptop.

Thats what I did 6 months ago though, and it ain't working too well. I kept the factory build on it for ages, must have been about 4 years - since then its' been rebuilt about 6 times, mucking around with different OS's etc

Might mess around tonight with an Ubuntu distro and wine, see what it thinks of Office 2000 or 2003.

 

[eddyc]

Unfortunately 512MB of RAM is the absolute minimum I would consider running XP on (yes it will work with 256 but really?). You cannot expect good performance.

I wonder if the large improvements in the OS at SP2 mean that it uses more RAM? That might explain why it worked better when it first came out even though the hardware has not changed...

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I have a notebook with similar specifications and I when I upgraded the RAM to 1GB it was a massive performance boost. Hence I would suggest getting a pair of 512MB DIMMs. If the motherboard runs the RAM in single channel anyway a single 1GB DIMM should do the job.

 

[eddyc]

Or even buy just one 512 DIMM and keep one of the the 256s in there and run with 768MB. Even that would be a huge improvement. Then if you need more you can always buy another 512 at a later stage.

 

[Amonlym]

i expect the reason why its feeling less capable now than when you got it is because 4 years ago banner adds were gifs not flash and messenger was a slim, lightweight chat prog (relatively speaking). combining multi MB flash adds with the memory hogging footprint of messenger 14 probably is the culprit.

try using classic windows messenger (4.? i guess is the version) and disabling flash - I am sure you will find the performance much more acceptable. as for a fix - some ram as the others have suggested and make sure hdd is in good health by checking its smart status and windows logs to make sure theres no bad sector reallocation or similar going on.