[Closed] Refreshing a laptop

Go to Windows 10 (which is in support whereas 8.1 isn't) clean install - instructions below

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/14/21065140/how-to-upgrade-microsoft-windows-7-10-free-os

Don't bother with antivirus, Windows Defender is all you need;

Max out the memory and fit a SSD.

Typed on my 8 year old laptop that's running fine,

I did read once that a dead battery can slow things down even though you're using the adaptor. Might be a myth.

My work laptop is a 2010 Compaq i7. Has always run Linux, I put an SSD in it a few years back, it runs perfectly. Sure the screen looks a bit crappy compared to my home machine (Macbook pro also on linux), I always say I'll get a new laptop this year but it just keeps going.

Pop! OS is a good flavour of Linux for newbies.
https://pop.system76.com/

Oh Jesus.

Tell your employer they need a better BYOD policy or supply you with new hardware or at least some commercial grade security or they will be in for a world of pain. Just because they're using remote desktop doesn't make it secure.

An 8 year old laptop that was cheap new, will likely be about 10 years old tech-wise. It's probably okay for web browsing at home, but it's not up to working on 8 hours a day, even two days a week. It'll also die on you with little provocation.

If you really must, as above, install a fresh version of Win 10, try to increase the RAM to 8GB and fit an SSD. Depending on how much RAM you need, it'll cost you £100 at a minimum. Windows defender is fine for you, but your employer shouldn't expect MS to come riding to the rescue if it all goes wrong, the reason why commercial security costs more is for their support, not the AV element.

As above, install Win10.

An SSD and at least 8GB RAM will make a big difference.

Once you've got everything running, hit Alt + Ctrl + Del. Then select "Task Manager". Open "More Details" and go to the Startup tab. This will show you the apps that open on startup. Disable apps that don't need to run at startup. For example, my brand new machine had Skype enabled on startup. That just slows everything down. I can manually launch Skype when I want to use it.

Then go to the Start menu and type "Control Panel" and open the System applet. Go to "Advanced System Settings". On the "Advanced" tab, open Settings under the "Performance" section. Open the Visual Effects tab and set it to "Adjust for best performance". This will disable visual effects, which can slow the machine down a lot. Go to the Advanced tab. It should be set to "Adjust for best performance of Programs".

As (most of the above).

New battery off eBay.

SSD, either 2.5" or M.2, most likely the former at that age but check first.

Max out the RAM, just because it's cheap.

Do a clean install of Windows 10. None of that Toshiba bloat will actually be doing anything usefull.

My laptop is probably older than yours (i3 2-core, windows 7 and DDR3 ram!) and still runs just fine with W10 and an SSD for normal office stuff.

For refreshing your laptop, what Murray said. SSD, Windows 10 (google "media creation tool"), if you're coming from W8.1 then things like 'licence keys' are a non-issue.

For work purposes, tell them you don't have a functional computer so they'll have to send you one out or you can't do any work. Not your problem.

RDPing to a desktop... I'm sure even where to start with that. If I were your new IT manager I'd be rocking up with a big ol' bag of P45s, that's cracked.

my brand new machine had Skype enabled on startup. That just slows everything down.

If Skype "slows everything down" then that machine isn't fit for purpose and I'd be sending it back, that's an absolutely ludicrous situation to be in. You shouldn't have to be cocking about with Task Manager or Control Panel, this isn't twenty years ago.

Cougar

RDPing to a desktop… I’m sure even where to start with that. If I were your new IT manager I’d be rocking up with a big ol’ bag of P45s, that’s cracked.

Why's that, then?
We've been RDPing to a desktop at work since March last year.
I dunno the technical reasons why, or whether this is a really crap way of doing things? It's a bit of a pain, but seems to work OK.
We've all got CAD workstations and there's now way the laptops we were assigned could run it.
I suspect one of the problems is that we are running really old CAD and PDM software that has to run on Win7 so that's what we still run on our workstations.

We pay quite a lot for continued Win7 support 🙄

We were supposed to have sorted this years ago and got up to date, but the management have gone round in circles and given up on sorting it several times.

I did read once that a dead battery can slow things down even though you’re using the adaptor. Might be a myth

It's not a myth. Ive seen this first hand on some newish DELLs. They seem to treat a dead battery as a flat battery (even with the power connected) and put the hardware into some sort of low power mode which basically grinds the device to a halt. New battery sorts it out straight away.

Why’s that, then?
We’ve been RDPing to a desktop at work since March last year.

Depends exactly how your doing it TBH. If you've got an RDS server that's using network creds to grant you access then allowing you to RDP onto your own device then that's better than nothing. There are better solutions but if it's set up properly and the password/account lockout policy is robust enough it's less risky.

Why’s that, then?

Because it's retarded.

We’ve been RDPing to a desktop at work since March last year.

Over a VPN or directly?

We’ve all got CAD workstations and there’s now way the laptops we were assigned could run it.

So why is it in the office rather than under your desk?

I suspect one of the problems is that we are running really old CAD and PDM software that has to run on Win7 so that’s what we still run on our workstations.

I doubt that's actually true, rather no-one's tried. W7 and W10 is fundamentally the same architecture.

We pay quite a lot for continued Win7 support 🙄

Of course you do. That money would be better spent getting your outdated software to work on modern hardware. Extended "support" aside, you're increasingly going to find that new computers won't physically run a twelve-year old operating system, the first time one of your workstations goes bang you're screwed.

We were supposed to have sorted this years ago and got up to date, but the management have gone round in circles and given up on sorting it several times.

Well.

Usually I'd say fit an SSD and shove in all the cheap ram that it can hold, but spending your own money for a work machine is just wrong. It's up to them to give you what you need.

If you want to use it for anything, do upgrade to windows 10 though, and sack any antivirus other than windows defender. As clean an install as you can manage is good, you might be able to find a "fresh" install image for your laptop online but they're usually the bloat infested nonsense that the manufacturer inflicted on it from the factory. (laptops: less able to deal with all this shit, and simultaneously always full of it)

I still like CCleaner and Defraggler. They're not amazing but they're really simple and quick to use and they can uninstall crap, disable random nonsense that always starts on startup for no reason at all, and generally speed things up a little. (don't use defraggler if you get an SSD)

If this is work related as above get your employer to provide you with the kit. Having to supply your own tools for the job is a ridiculous ask, particularly if it can affect company security.

Any suggestions for a SSD? I've (nothing to do with work - honest!) got a laptop that really should be fine but it's basically unusable as the disc seems to take forever (gave up after 30mins yesterday) to drop below 100% usage. Checked the start-up list, hardly anything in there. Memory and CPU behave as you'd expect, so thinking SSD to fix it.

@mashr go Samsung Evo and you can't go too wrong

I’ve been using Kingston SSD Now drives for several years and they are about the best I have found. They seem to be faster and more reliable than quite a lot of higher priced alternatives eg Crucial.

I revived an old HP laptop last year just to facilitate basic home working; SSD, more memory and W10 made it 'adequate', not fantastic.

But I also lobbed a couple of hundred quid at a refurbed ex-corporate desktop (i5/16GB/W10) that is a better general "family PC", not least because I get a better monitor and keyboard for WFH.

I've since been given a shiny new company laptop, so I'll be wiping the VPN stuff off the other computers, I may well switch the ancient laptop to Linux or dual booting, but it's largely a pointless toy now...

I can't imagine having to remote desktop a W7 CAD station via a knackered laptop, That's just bonkers. Clearly a bean counter has failed to grasp the flaw in "maintaining" out of date software and not investing in appropriate hardware, The hit to productivity will be substantial. Some dickhead has been sold a licencing/support package haven't they, the trouble is it's not 2002 anymore.

They either need to send you home with your CAD station or a meaty enough laptop and a couple of decent sized monitors to plug in, or else make arrangements for you to get back into the office...

+1 for Samsung EVO, accept no substitute.

I still like CCleaner and Defraggler.

And whilst I agree with everything else you said, I would vehemently disagree with this.

CCleaner has it's place, and it's place is somewhere in the 2000s. If you're in a position where you feel the need to run 'cleaner' apps in 2021 then the problem almost certainly has a better solution. And recommending it blindly to users is flat-out dangerous, it could potentially cause more harm than good in the wrong hands.

Similarly, third-party defrag apps haven't been relevant since Vista and became of questionable use post-NT4 even. And of course, as you said, not just utterly pointless but could actually damage an SSD.

If they work for you then fill your boots. But it's important to understand, Windows 10 is not Windows 95 or XP, a lot of the issues that these programs were originally designed to handle either no longer exist or are handled far better by Windows itself. You don't need to 'clean' something which isn't dirty.

What cookeaa said.

On this:

The hit to productivity will be substantial.

You'll also fail Cyber Essentials, if such a thing matters to your organisation. If you're doing work for third parties, some require this before they'll do business with you.

I know this because our certification is up for renewal soon and we've just put the fear of christ into our IT department. (-:

The hit to productivity will be substantial.

The more I think about this, the more I think it's a nail:head interface.

We had a customer that I don't think still exists, whom I did a lot of work for*. It was an advice charity and it was mostly staffed by older ladies who came over all "ooh, young man!" when we had to send engineers out.

They were on the phone to us lot with wide and varied issues but they all stemmed back to the same root problem - all their desktop PCs were ancient and shit. You could launch Internet Explorer (different times) and then go and brew up in the time it took to launch. I kept pushing them to upgrade and their response was, we're a charity, we can't really afford it.

Then one day it hit me. You've got, what, somewhere around 15 women in that office IIRC, all of whom are battling with systems where simple tasks which should be near-instantaneous take minutes, how many (wo)man-hours a day are you losing to paying your staff to watch an egg-timer spin? Can you actually afford not to replace those PCs?

(* - I don't think these two facts are related)

Any suggestions for a SSD? I’ve (nothing to do with work – honest!) got a laptop that really should be fine but it’s basically unusable as the disc seems to take forever (gave up after 30mins yesterday) to drop below 100% usage. Checked the start-up list, hardly anything in there. Memory and CPU behave as you’d expect, so thinking SSD to fix it.

Kingston, Crucial, Samsung, Western Digital or Seagate, there are others. Get a known brand and you'll be fine.

Each of them make a range of SSDs from cheap to high performance. Obviously Samsung 870 Evo is a very good SSD, but in reality for most users, most of the time the difference is negligible at best between those and say a Crucial BX series (their cheaper ones) especially on older hardware. If you really must have a silly fast disc you'll want a NMVE anyway.

(I buy them by the case and we fit and install dozens, sometimes hundreds a month)

Can you actually afford not to replace those PCs?

Absolutely this.

Our min spec in work is now 7th Gen i5 or 8th Gen i3, 8GB RAM and SATA SSD.

We advise a working life for Desktops of 5 years, if they buy current or last gen.

We had clients who didn't see the point of upgrading older, HDD based stuff, they seemed happy paying their guys £35k a year or whatever to sit there drinking coffee whilst their PC cranked up because they wouldn't pay £600 or whatever for a new one.... and they didn't even consider the 'frustration factor' have you ever had to work with someone complaining about their PC? They get pissed off and stop working to moan, they moan to all their colleagues, their colleagues join in, they all moan, everyone become cynical. Worst still, weeks, even months after we replace everything and it's all working well, staff will still tell you it's crap - not because theirs is, because it's not, but because they assume it's still crap because everyone said so.

this is well worth a watch:

His voice is slightly annoying and theres a sponsorship advert

I've been trying to refresh mine for a while. Decent when new, but now old. 2nd gen i7, 6GB of RAM, but I can plug some more in if/when I get Win10 installed.

SSD in there, I think the swap from the original, knackered HDD is confusing the Setup - it apparently "can't tell" if there's enough space. That's after it told me there wasn't enough space on the SRP, discovering the partition labelled "System Reserved" wasn't, making sure the actual SRP (labelled "data" had plenty.

Now going for a clean, fresh install after make some enquiries about purchased software being reinstalled.

A complete waste of my free time productivity, but a) no-one would pay me to do this, b) there's no way I would put up with this amount of ballache on work time, and b) if I can "save" £500 on a new laptop by getting this one up to speed, that's bike parts money.

this is well worth a watch:

That’s a good video, and if you’re not nerdy like me it’s worth noting they’re not comparing brands of SSD or even different perform models of them, but completely different systems.

Most of us will have SATA only PCs and Laptops. A few might have NVME but then you wouldn’t be upgrading from an HDD and PCI is really the realm of the enthusiast at the moment.

Cougar
Full Member

CCleaner has it’s place, and it’s place is somewhere in the 2000s. If you’re in a position where you feel the need to run ‘cleaner’ apps in 2021 then the problem almost certainly has a better solution. And recommending it blindly to users is flat-out dangerous, it could potentially cause more harm than good in the wrong hands.

I think this is basically elitist hysteria to be quite frank, aside from the malware thing of a few years ago it's a well proven tool.

Defraggler I like mostly for its better feedback and ease of sorting, but it absolutely does work better on my PCs than the windows defrag tool. I mean, the value of defragging at all is way lower these days but when you've got an old underperforming machine I'd still do it. Little to be gained, nothing to be lost, effortless to do.

I'm loathe to get into this argument because I'm not sure as I care sufficiently. But I would have 100% agreed with you, like twenty years ago.

CCleaner is pointless. It was a brilliant tool in its day, but nowadays if you don't know how to disable background apps via the OS or using their own interface then you likely aren't in a position to decide whether they should be disabled or not. Your registry isn't dirty. The potential to break something is high relative to any perceived or actual gain. You've clawed back a few kB of RAM on a system with memory in the order of GBs, big whoop, it's akin to sawing the handle off your toothbrush before going car-camping. The only reason it still exists is marketing.

Defraggler I like mostly for its better feedback and ease of sorting, but it absolutely does work better on my PCs than the windows defrag tool.

What does that sentence even mean? "Better" how? "Absolutely," cobblers. Are you not running an SSD as a system drive?

If you can tell the difference double-blind between a PC defragged at all and one not, let alone one defragged with your app VS Microsoft's inbuilt code, I'll give you my bike. Hell, I'll give you my house.

In the 1990s fragmentation was a valid concern, but even back then we were having discussions around whether it was really an issue with NTFS over FAT32. MS were claiming that NTFS didn't need defragging at all (which turned out to be a bit of a fib). In the era of SSDs it's not just a nonsense but actively harmful.

Put it this way. Who do you think knows more about NTFS partition management? The multinational company who invented it and have had it under continuous development for the last thirty years, or a two-man bedroom startup who were bought out by an AV company?

I like Piriform products. Recuva is ace and I've recommended it numerous times. But in 2021 you do not need a 'cleaner', you do not need a third-party defrag utility, and you do not need any manner of other third-party tools such as desktop firewall or AV any more than you need a "swap file partition". These companies are riding on people's memories of long-resolved historical issues. You're not running NT4 any more and you're not going to be seeing a return on freeing up a few kB any more. And storage is cheap.

Microsoft knows more about Windows memory management and storage management than you or I do. Leave it alone.

@PJ 100%. Reliable equipment isn’t a luxury it’s a necessity and connecting non corporate equipment to the corporate LAN would see you out the door.

If your company needs / wants remote working decent kit is just the cost of doing business.

I'm not wishing to be drawn into the argument for the same reasons as Cougar but can't help adding my tuppence worth.

Basically this though..

But in 2021 you do not need a ‘cleaner’, you do not need a third-party defrag utility, and you do not need any manner of other third-party tools such as desktop firewall or AV any more than you need a “swap file partition”. These companies are riding on people’s memories of long-resolved historical issues. You’re not running NT4 any more and you’re not going to be seeing a return on freeing up a few kB any more. And storage is cheap.

Microsoft knows more about Windows memory management and storage management than you or I do. Leave it alone.

The Windows registry is not a place most people need to go. There are some useful tweaks that can be unlocked by modifying certain keys sometimes yes, (TBH PowerShell is what you want to be using rather than hacking the registry in any case)  but it's best left alone unless you 100% know what you are doing. Allowing some third party tool to delete registry keys it thinks are "dirty" is madness in W10. W10 is probably the best operating system Microsoft have produced and it generally knows how to look after itself (unless you bugger about with the settings).

For basic home user stuff like running Office etc, It does like 4Gb RAM, an SSD and an i3 minimum IMO and works a treat on an i5. Obviously if you are after running CAD type software etc then you will need some oomph.

Anyway, each to their own.

Thanks for the advice folks. Finally bit the bullet and ordered a Samsung Evo. Now able to go from zero fully usable machine inside 20 seconds (as opposed to 10+ mins, if actually able to use it at all) so I’ll take that!

Hadn’t expected the difference to be quite so stark tbh!

An SSD, even the budget ones are the single biggest upgrade you can do if you're still on an old spin drive.