I have an ancient Acer laptop I use for internet connection in the shop via a wireless bridge. Handy, but painfully slow booting up with the OEM SATA hard disk. I expect there were other factors, but I wasn't able to identify and eliminate them.

I decided to look into a Solid State Drive as the one in my desktop is blazing fast. Wasn't sure one would be available for a laptop that old but found one on Ebay for $35! 180GB vs. the OEM 500GB, but since all I do is look stuff up and consult YouTube mechanics, drive space isn't an issue.

Swapped out the drives, spent some time looking up how to get it to boot from a CD and then loaded a virgin copy of WIN10 (licensed CD). Now it boots up in less than 30 seconds vs. several minutes previously!

A win for sure.

If ancient w/ limited RAM, converting to linux (ie - Ubuntu) may also speed things up a bit and require less page swapping.

If only browsing and not storing any data, you can probably install linux as dual boot to try it out.

quote:

Originally posted by konata88:
If ancient w/ limited RAM, converting to linux (ie - Ubuntu) may also speed things up a bit and require less page swapping.

If only browsing and not storing any data, you can probably install linux as dual boot to try it out.

There are even a number of "light weight" Linux distributions that require as little as 256MB of RAM. Most of these can be installed on a USB thumb drive for alternative booting options.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that FreeBSD is another option. Even the most recent version can handle old systems with limited resources. This is made possible by a memory architecture that unifies RAM, swap, and paging so that unused portions of a disk, or even a file on a disk will extend the amount of apparent RAM available to the CPU. There is a FreeBSD distribution named "NomadBSD" that is designed to run entirely from a thumb drive, and not disturb any OS installed on a hard drive.

All of these Linux/BSD OS's are free of cost, and available for download. In most cases, they are actively updated as security vulnerabilities are uncovered with unmatched backwards compatibility. Most now come with a automatically installed GUI that differs from what one may be accustomed to in only minor ways.

quote:

Originally posted by PHPaul:
I have an ancient Acer laptop I use for internet connection in the shop via a wireless bridge. Handy, but slow booting up with the OEM SATA hard disk.

I decided to look into a Solid State Drive as the one in my desktop is blazing fast.

Swapped out the drives, spent some time looking up how to get it to boot from a CD and then loaded a virgin copy of WIN10 (licensed CD). Now it boots up in less than 30 seconds vs. several minutes previously!

Did the same thing for my wife's HP laptop. Extremely slow, 20-30 min before you could do anything. The hard drive was pegged at 100% active time. Out came the 1Tb SATA and popped in a 500Gb SSD. Ready now in <30 seconds.

The old 1Tb drive works fine as a standalone backup drive.

quote:

Originally posted by 229DAK:
The old 1Tb drive works fine as a standalone backup drive.

Funny you should mention that, I just ordered a SATA to USB case for the old drive for just that purpose.