Speeding up an old laptop - Methods?

SideWinder

SideWinder

SideWinder

Consigliere
Joined
12 Jun 2004
Posts
151,030
Location
SW17
Hi,

I've had my Dell Vostro 1500 (T7500 @ 2.2Ghz, 2Gb RAM) for almost 6 years and it's been rock solid. I've got a new laptop but i want to keep my old one going.

I've defragged it using Defraggler and gone through msconfig but is there anything else i can do to speed it up? It used to be quite speedy but now it struggles to open a webpage whilst YouTube is playing and pauses the music for a second or so.

It's running Vista Ultimate SP2 with all updates.
 
Put an SSD in there, and pair it with a fresh installation of Windows.

That will give you years more life out of it.

Given the age, it's probably a SATA-II connector for the hard drive, so you can take a look at some of the slower SSDs, which should still saturate the 300mbps interface, but given the prices of some of the top of the line SSDs, grabbing one of those gives you the ability to move it to another machine and make full use of it at a later date.
 
SSD, 4GB ram

Did the same to my £60 netbook, the thing flies now!

I don't bother with any security software on it, just adblock plus and running as a non-admin.
 
if you have the time, this will be the order i would try things in
Fresh Clean install (without bloatware)
More RAM
SSD
 
for a machine that was being used daily as his main PC, i would agree with you bledd., but since its already been replaced with another, I thought he might want to spend as little as possible. hence why trying a fresh install first, before getting more RAM and/or a SSD.
 
SSD. If it's not SATA then maybe upgrade the RAM and run something like eboostr with a 1GB RAM cache.
 
Assuming you dont wish to spend any money, a fresh install wont hurt. Although if you're using original Vista media the update process is going to take about a week.
 
Have you not formatted it at all? This in itself will speed it up by getting shot of all the accumulated rubbish that will have piled into it over the years.
 
dowcow said:
You could also stick Linux on it. With the right version it would fly, great for a bit of web-browsing, e-mail etc.
Click to expand...

This.

I did this a few weeks ago on an old lesser spec laptop and it absolutely flies now. I previously had no knowledge of Linux and still don't really but it was unbelievable how easy it was and everything just worked.

I installed Linux Mint Petra with Xfce.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom