Old Vaio Needs New Hard Drive

HyperSonic · 5 Oct 2012 at 14:07

We have an old Vaio that we use as a web browser and was wondering if it would be worth upgrading the hard drive as loading stuff and paging seems to take forever.

TOSHIBA MK8025GAS 4200rpm
1.7ghz Pentium M
2gb DDR2 5300
Geforce Go 6400
Windows XP

wazza300 · 5 Oct 2012 at 14:11

maybe a hybrid hdd? xp wont support trim in ssd's

something like a seagate momentus

tigerstyle · 5 Oct 2012 at 14:17

wouldn't more ram be the go here?

HyperSonic · 5 Oct 2012 at 15:24

already had more ram in it - 2gig is its limit, used to have 512mb

HyperSonic · 5 Oct 2012 at 16:27

wazza300 said:
maybe a hybrid hdd? xp wont support trim in ssd's

something like a seagate momentus

should also point out that its an ide drive, so i'll need an ide replacement

HyperSonic · 5 Oct 2012 at 17:03

seen a Seagate Momentus 5400.3 80GB for £37

are there any known problems with these?

unleashed · 6 Oct 2012 at 08:04

Personally I'd save the money toward a new build or perhaps a bundle upgrade. I certainly would not want to be buying IDE kit

tigerstyle · 6 Oct 2012 at 08:11

Indeed, can it run a chromium or linux distro to speed things up?

HyperSonic · 6 Oct 2012 at 09:01

whats chromium like?

it's not something i've ever looked into - built on top of ubuntu, is it any faster then bog standard ubuntu?

i tried xubuntu for speed but my wife wasn't too impressed so we went back to xp

Beans on toast Dave · 6 Oct 2012 at 09:03

web pages should load fine even on a old m/c
have you done a fresh format? as that should help

HyperSonic · 6 Oct 2012 at 09:05

also i've found an 80gig momentus 5400.3 for 33.49 now

i'm stuck between getting that or finding a good second hand laptop on ebay as like unleashed said, the whole thing could do with an upgrade

what would i need to run windows 7 at a decent rate?
i'd be more than willing to turn off all the gui niceness and effects as i've done it to this xp install anyway.

HyperSonic · 6 Oct 2012 at 09:21

@challengedavid thanks for making me sit back and think

set all of my services back to standard settings to see if i'd turned something off that would have affected my internet speeds and installed chrome to compare to pale moon - things seem to be flying now

i had turned loads of services off when i was using 512mb ram but since the upgrade theres less need to strip the install back as much

cheers guys! :cool:

unleashed · 6 Oct 2012 at 09:21

HyperSonic said:
what would i need to run windows 7 at a decent rate?

Well I have windows 7 running on a atom based netbook. Performance is acceptable for browsing, email etc. but prefer to use my Ivy bridge i7 lappy

Hagar · 6 Oct 2012 at 10:59

unleashed said:
Well I have windows 7 running on a atom based netbook. Performance is acceptable for browsing, email etc. but prefer to use my Ivy bridge i7 lappy

Same here for win 7 ultimate on a netbook, N450 CPU 1.6GHz and 2MB ram. Using a 120GB vertex 2E for the main drive. Good for browsing, flash movies etc.

marms · 7 Oct 2012 at 00:58

wazza300 said:
maybe a hybrid hdd? xp wont support trim in ssd's

something like a seagate momentus

On an ssd that supports garbage collection won't it take care of that without windows support?

wazza300 · 7 Oct 2012 at 00:59

Yh should do