Giving Toshiba Satellite new lease of life.

NathG79

NathG79

NathG79

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Toshiba Satellite Pro C850-1K3 - 15.6" - Core i3 3120M - Windows 7 64-bit - 4 GB RAM - 500 GB HDD​

My partner has a old laptop that we use occasionally for phone backups and other boring stuff.
During the last 12months it has been getting increasingly slow to react to normal desktop use.
I have upgraded it from Windows 7 to Windows 8, then 10 over the course of its life and it doesn't meet the requirements for Windows 11.
It currently has 8gb of ram over 2x 4gb sticks (which I upgraded previously) and a slow 5400rpm mechanical HDD.
I have ordered 2x 8gb Ram sticks and a SSD to try and give it a new lease of life.
Am I wasting my time? Will the CPU be the weakest link here even with a SSD and 16gb of ram helping it along?.
 
NathG79 said:

Toshiba Satellite Pro C850-1K3 - 15.6" - Core i3 3120M - Windows 7 64-bit - 4 GB RAM - 500 GB HDD​

My partner has a old laptop that we use occasionally for phone backups and other boring stuff.
During the last 12months it has been getting increasingly slow to react to normal desktop use.
I have upgraded it from Windows 7 to Windows 8, then 10 over the course of its life and it doesn't meet the requirements for Windows 11.
It currently has 8gb of ram over 2x 4gb sticks (which I upgraded previously) and a slow 5400rpm mechanical HDD.
I have ordered 2x 8gb Ram sticks and a SSD to try and give it a new lease of life.
Am I wasting my time? Will the CPU be the weakest link here even with a SSD and 16gb of ram helping it along?.
Click to expand...
I can't remember the specification exactly but my parents had an older laptop, similar spec to yours, Intel i5 with 4 cores I think, 8GB RAM and Windows 10. it was slow and lethargic and really could have easily become E-Waste or sat in the corner unused and unloved. So I backed up anything they wanted kept to USB, installed a 120Gb SATA SSD and installed a clean, non ASUS bloat Windows 10 back onto it. It was like a new laptop. Everything was fast and zippy, websites and webpages opened quickly, even Mail for windows 10 was fast to use as well. It certainly gave it a new lease of life and she still has it around 2 years later.
 
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NathG79 said:

Toshiba Satellite Pro C850-1K3 - 15.6" - Core i3 3120M - Windows 7 64-bit - 4 GB RAM - 500 GB HDD​

My partner has a old laptop that we use occasionally for phone backups and other boring stuff.
During the last 12months it has been getting increasingly slow to react to normal desktop use.
I have upgraded it from Windows 7 to Windows 8, then 10 over the course of its life and it doesn't meet the requirements for Windows 11.
It currently has 8gb of ram over 2x 4gb sticks (which I upgraded previously) and a slow 5400rpm mechanical HDD.
I have ordered 2x 8gb Ram sticks and a SSD to try and give it a new lease of life.
Am I wasting my time? Will the CPU be the weakest link here even with a SSD and 16gb of ram helping it along?.
Click to expand...

An old dual core is going to struggle with all the bloat and dross windows does in the background indexing etc.
A clean install of windows 10 on an SSD should be useable, I have an X230 with a similar processor and it's still useable is I manage my expectations though still a little slower than a used £100 chromebook.

When you first boot the machine it does all the updates and checks... so I usually let it sit for 10 minutes or so and then it's fine.
Trying to use it straight away if it hasn't been powered on for a couple of weeks... is usually a download nightmare.

The SSD will likely make a good difference, as will a fresh install of windows. Download from microsoft and use your existing key.
Not all SSD are equal though so some super cheap SSD's can actually perform worse than HDD when copying a lot of data.

Linux is the way to go... I'm in the process of migrating... slowly
 
Little update.
After a bit more research I've found that the laptop CPU is not soldered on and is upgradeable.
I've managed to snare a i5 Quad core that boosts from 3.0 - 3.7 and has the same TDP (35w).
It was only £23, (I couldn't bring myself to go full on i7, cheapest I could find was £40-60.
 
SSD will make the biggest difference. Recent degraded performance could be a sign the HDD is dying too. 8GB RAM is probably fine for a machine like that, going to 16GB if it supports it probably won't make much of a difference as you're ultimately limited by that CPU. While the socket might take an upgraded CPU, there's no guarantee the BIOS will like it (though someone may have done it and can confirm it works on that machine). Worth a gamble for £23 and your time I suppose.

I did a similar upgrade on my Nans laptop a couple weeks ago - AMD A9 9410, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD. Put a cheap Crucial BX500 in with a cloned image of the original drive, upgrade the RAM to 12GB (machine has 4GB on the board and an empty SODIMM slot) - for her usage of email, internet, and playing solitaire variants its fine on Windows 10. She lives in a very rural area where you're lucky to see more than 10Mbit anyway, so for most modern internet tasks the connection is the limiting factor. Will have to look at OS options next year as Win10 ends support, not keen on the Linux support as she's barely comfortable with Windows, learning a different OS will be a nightmare. I'm not the only one supporting her either and I don't think any of the other family members who help have any experience outside of Windows either.
 
SonicSW20 said:
SSD will make the biggest difference. Recent degraded performance could be a sign the HDD is dying too. 8GB RAM is probably fine for a machine like that, going to 16GB if it supports it probably won't make much of a difference as you're ultimately limited by that CPU. While the socket might take an upgraded CPU, there's no guarantee the BIOS will like it (though someone may have done it and can confirm it works on that machine). Worth a gamble for £23 and your time I suppose.

I did a similar upgrade on my Nans laptop a couple weeks ago - AMD A9 9410, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD. Put a cheap Crucial BX500 in with a cloned image of the original drive, upgrade the RAM to 12GB (machine has 4GB on the board and an empty SODIMM slot) - for her usage of email, internet, and playing solitaire variants its fine on Windows 10. She lives in a very rural area where you're lucky to see more than 10Mbit anyway, so for most modern internet tasks the connection is the limiting factor. Will have to look at OS options next year as Win10 ends support, not keen on the Linux support as she's barely comfortable with Windows, learning a different OS will be a nightmare. I'm not the only one supporting her either and I don't think any of the other family members who help have any experience outside of Windows either.
Click to expand...
Thanks for your advice. Yeah, I'm hoping the bios will play ball with the new CPU, I've watched a few you tube videos of teardowns and forums where people have done the same, the only ones that had trouble were running old Celerons and Pentiums 1st edition with that model kinda stuff, with a slightly different chipset, they ran into trouble whereas the laptop would shut down after 30mins of use even though it posted and ran OK.
This particular model has the same CPU I've bought on more expensive versions of the laptop. We shall see.
 
SonicSW20 said:
Will have to look at OS options next year as Win10 ends support, not keen on the Linux support as she's barely comfortable with Windows, learning a different OS will be a nightmare.
Click to expand...
Have a look at getting win 10 enterprise IOT LTSC edition.
Supported to 2032 if I recall correctly.
 
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Had a bit of time tonight to move over files and backups from the old HDD to a spare SSD.
I have a brand new blank 500GB SSD installed into the laptop, I have a usb drive with windows 10 media creation tool on usb, tried enabling ufei/and csm both do not boot the usb. Swapped boot order to usb 1st.
Changed usb settings to enable during sleep.
Basically tried everything.
If I boot from ufei I get this screen, and the laptop seems to do nothing.



And if I change to csm I get a blue screen (not bsod) laptop keeps running for a bit then turns itself off.



Not sure why this is happening, I will put the media creation tool on another usb tommorow and see if that sorts it.
 
you've made sure that the new ssd works yeah?
if no luck, you can jerry rig to install win 10 in the ssd on another computer first then put that ssd into the laptop

also have you installed the new ram?
i would do one thing at a time first
pick either the ram or ssd, not both. then at least if something goes wrong it would be the part that has just been installed
 
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tamzzy said:
you've made sure that the new ssd works yeah?
if no luck, you can jerry rig to install win 10 in the ssd on another computer first then put that ssd into the laptop

also have you installed the new ram?
i would do one thing at a time first
pick either the ram or ssd, not both. then at least if something goes wrong it would be the part that has just been installed
Click to expand...
Thanks, yeah, new SSD works, I installed the ram a week or so and Bios recognised it.
Going to try the media creation tool on another usb drive.
Failing that I'm going to burn an ISO windows 10 install onto DVD then boot from that.
 
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