old laptop help

Dazzzer10 · 7 Mar 2020 at 11:08

I have an old laptop and I have not used in years and wanted to see if I can put it to some use, specs compaq presario v5000 , Windows xp sp 2 home edition ,AMD Turion 64 mobile , 1.58ghz , 896 ram ,

My problem is when I connect to the internet in wire or wireless internet explorer shows " page cant be displayed " but when I type www.google .com in the address bar google comes up "
now I can search things like if I want to know the date or time as example it shows it but when I click to open a site it shows page cant display , funny enough bing search works www.msn.com worked ,

I know the laptop is old with low ram I have restored windows xp to factory and it still wont work , I cant update windows XP as it is not supported so i was wondering if anyone can help to get this laptop online even if it runs slow.

Zefan · 7 Mar 2020 at 11:16

The simple answer is, absolutely do not under any circumstances run XP. It is horribly insecure now, it has been unsupported for so long that it is a very bad idea to use it.

As for your specific issue, I'm going to guess it's either DNS related (set your DNS server address to be 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4) or a browser version that is simply way too old to be happy with many of today's websites.

Dazzzer10 · 7 Mar 2020 at 13:32

Zefan said:
The simple answer is, absolutely do not under any circumstances run XP. It is horribly insecure now, it has been unsupported for so long that it is a very bad idea to use it.

As for your specific issue, I'm going to guess it's either DNS related (set your DNS server address to be 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4) or a browser version that is simply way too old to be happy with many of today's websites.

Would you advise me to update to windows 10? My worry is will everything work on the laptop will win 10 support everything on my laptop, I can upgrade the ram to 2gb max

linktoinsanity · 10 Mar 2020 at 13:08

I would not update to Windows 10 if I were you, that laptop would become so slow it would be unusable.

Essentially XP is pretty useless these days unless you just want to use it for retro gaming for example.

Hades · 11 Mar 2020 at 17:56

I would try a lightweight Linux distribution such as Xubuntu and see if that works better.

Deleted member 77746 · 11 Mar 2020 at 19:14

You most you going to get is something like ubuntu desktop running where you can at least browse.

linktoinsanity · 16 Mar 2020 at 14:11

Even then, it really is not going to be a great experience (tried it with a Vista based laptop myself recently out of curiosity).