upgrading five year old laptop

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JWH

Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with milenium os.
533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be getting endless trouble
especially with his belkin wireless adapter connection. would it be a
good idea to upgrade to windows xp with such an old pc?
 
JWH said:
Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with milenium os.
533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be getting endless trouble
especially with his belkin wireless adapter connection. would it be a
good idea to upgrade to windows xp with such an old pc?
Click to expand...


unless he can upgrade the RAM to at LEAST 256MB then I wouldn't even
bother.......
 
JWH said:
Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with milenium os.
533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be getting endless trouble
especially with his belkin wireless adapter connection. would it be a
good idea to upgrade to windows xp with such an old pc?
Click to expand...
My wife uses an old IBM ThinkPad with 128 ram and I installed WIN XP Home.
It is obviously slow and we restrict it to IE6 and Outlook Express.
It does use a Belkin wireless card.
 
JWH said:
Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with milenium os.
533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be getting endless trouble
especially with his belkin wireless adapter connection. would it be a
good idea to upgrade to windows xp with such an old pc?
Click to expand...

When one has "endless trouble" with a computer, upgrading the OS almost
always results in a computer that is still plagued with "endless trouble".
Steve
 
Og said:
When one has "endless trouble" with a computer, upgrading the OS
almost always results in a computer that is still plagued with
"endless trouble". Steve
Click to expand...

Yes, but they did say 'Windows Me' which is endless trouble in itself.
 
I run a dell P2 400 cpir with 128 ram, albeit slowly, OK for
general internet use, also use a belkin PC card, running
winXP pro

format and new install over the top of win98 went fine
 
[X-Posting w/o F'up2 trimmed]
Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with milenium
os. 533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be getting endless
trouble especially with his belkin wireless adapter connection.
would it be a good idea to upgrade to windows xp with such an old pc?
Click to expand...

No. An OS upgrade is not designed to repair an unstable system.
 
Christopher wrote:

......
My wife uses an old IBM ThinkPad with 128 ram and I installed WIN XP Home.
It is obviously slow and we restrict it to IE6 and Outlook Express.
Click to expand...

And make sure no on-access virus scanner is slowing it down even more.
DAMN. You are gritty.
With IE6 you would need to "run in restricted context" at least, or even
better do use a restricted user account for surfing and mailing, and OE
should be set to never show html previews.
It does use a Belkin wireless card.
Click to expand...

Make sure no such resource hog as WPA is active.
Let the laptop run over night to send even more spams.
 
JWH said:
Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with milenium os.
533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be getting endless trouble
especially with his belkin wireless adapter connection. would it be a
good idea to upgrade to windows xp with such an old pc?
Click to expand...

RAM. More RAM. MUCH more RAM.
533 Mhz should let it go just fine, if you trim your XP a bit to release
graphics burden. And, since it's already 5 years old, get a new (bigger,
faster) harddrive as well, yours may already get slower and slower before
it finally makes the way out.
Since ME isn't such a target for viruses and trojans anymore, you may as
well keep living with it, practicing safe hex behind a NAT router. ME runs
firefox and thunderbird just fine.
Before you swap OS, try to swap your wlan card first, it may as well go bad.
 
--
Noel Paton (MS-MVP 2002-2006, Windows)

Nil Carborundum Illegitemi
http://www.crashfixpc.com

http://tinyurl.com/6oztj

Please read on how to post messages to NG's
Walter Mautner said:
Christopher wrote:

.....

And make sure no on-access virus scanner is slowing it down even more.
DAMN. You are gritty.
With IE6 you would need to "run in restricted context" at least, or even
better do use a restricted user account for surfing and mailing, and OE
should be set to never show html previews.


Make sure no such resource hog as WPA is active.
Let the laptop run over night to send even more spams.
Click to expand...

WPA?? - Resource hog?? WTF are you twittering on about??

--
Noel Paton (MS-MVP 2002-2006, Windows)

Nil Carborundum Illegitemi
http://www.crashfixpc.com

http://tinyurl.com/6oztj

Please read on how to post messages to NG's
 
Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with milenium os.
533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be getting endless trouble
especially with his belkin wireless adapter connection. would it be a
good idea to upgrade to windows xp with such an old pc?
Click to expand...

With 64 megs of ram it will run slow.
 
RAM. More RAM. MUCH more RAM.
533 Mhz should let it go just fine, if you trim your XP a bit to release
graphics burden. And, since it's already 5 years old, get a new (bigger,
faster) harddrive as well, yours may already get slower and slower before
it finally makes the way out.
Since ME isn't such a target for viruses and trojans anymore, you may as
well keep living with it, practicing safe hex behind a NAT router. ME runs
firefox and thunderbird just fine.
Before you swap OS, try to swap your wlan card first, it may as well go bad.
Click to expand...

IIWM, I'd forget about XP and stick 2000 on there. Okay, you don't get the
eye-candy but, then, it doesn't have the oomph for that. Okay, it might not
be supported anymore but, for a machine that old, who cares?

But also, IIWM, I wouldn't waste good money on an old machine. Put it towards
something newer. Like a nice new MacBook, for example.
 
JWH said:
Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with milenium os.
533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be getting endless trouble
especially with his belkin wireless adapter connection. would it be a
good idea to upgrade to windows xp with such an old pc?
Click to expand...


It may be possible, but I wouldn't call it a "good idea." As for
performance, the word "glacial" comes to mind, if the computer doesn't
have a CPU of at least 500 MHz along with at least 256 Mb of RAM.
You'll also want a larger hard drive, if you're going to add any
applications to the OS.

Acceptable performance is, of course, a matter of personal opinion
and depends entirely upon what *you* expect to do with your computer. If
all you want to do is play WinXP's built-in games, send and receive
simple emails, browse the Internet (while avoiding the more "ornamental"
web sites) etc., such a machine may well meet your needs. If, however,
you plan to take advantage of WinXP's multimedia capabilities, play
graphic-intensive games, or do advanced word or data processing, such a
machine would probably be woefully inadequate.

If you turn off all of WinXP GUI eye-candy, it will still be very
slow, but it might be usable for simple word processing, email,
web-browsing, etc. It won't be any good for graphics-intensive
applications, and most newer games. (During the public preview period,
I tested WinXP on a 500 MHz machine with 256 Mb of RAM, and it was much
slower than I like.)

To help improve WinXP's performance on older machines:

1) Right-click the Task Bar > Properties > Start Menu, ensure "Classic
Start menu" is selected.

2) Right-click an empty spot on the Desktop > Properties > Themes >
select "Windows Classic."

3) Right-click My Computer > Properties > Performance > Settings >
Visual Effects, ensure "Adjust for best performance" is selected.


--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Benjamin Franklin
 
JWH said:
Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with milenium os.
533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be getting endless trouble
especially with his belkin wireless adapter connection. would it be a
good idea to upgrade to windows xp with such an old pc?
Click to expand...


Have you made sure that your PC's hardware components are capable
of supporting WinXP? This information will be found at the PC's
manufacturer's web site, and on Microsoft's Windows Catalog:
(http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hcl/default.mspx) Additionally, run
Microsoft WinXP Upgrade Advisor to see if you have any incompatible
hardware components or applications.

You should, before proceeding, take a few minutes to ensure that
there are WinXP device drivers available for all of the machine's
components. There may not be, if the PC was specifically designed for
Win98/Me. Also bear in mind that PCs designed for, sold and run fine
with Win9x/Me very often do not meet WinXP's much more stringent
hardware quality requirements. This is particularly true of many
models in Compaq's consumer-class Presario product line or HP's
consumer-class Pavilion product line. WinXP, like WinNT and Win2K
before it, is quite sensitive to borderline defective or substandard
hardware (particularly motherboards, RAM and hard drives) that will
still support Win9x.

HOW TO Prepare to Upgrade Win98 or WinMe
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q316639

Upgrading to Windows XP
http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpupgrad.htm


--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Benjamin Franklin
 
In
JWH said:
Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with
milenium os. 533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be
getting endless trouble especially with his belkin wireless
adapter
connection. would it be a good idea to upgrade to windows
xp
with such an old pc?
Click to expand...

In a word: NO. All the specs are woefully inadequate to run XP
on that particular machine. It will be one constant time
consuing headache IF it's even able to run it.
A new WIN98 installation might work out well though. With
updates it's a perfectly viable operating system.

HTH
Pop
 
JWH said:
Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with
milenium os. 533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be
getting endless trouble especially with his belkin wireless adapter
connection. would it be a good idea to upgrade to windows xp
with such an old pc?
Click to expand...

"good idea"? No. Possible? Yes. Would I do it? Never.

Backup the data, settings, address book, etc., and reinstall the original
OS.
 
JWH said:
Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with
milenium os. 533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be
getting endless trouble especially with his belkin wireless adapter
connection. would it be a good idea to upgrade to windows xp
with such an old pc?
Click to expand...


NO! (If that looks like I'm shouting, I am!)

Although it meets the official minimum requirements, it's *way* underpowered
to run XP with anything approaching acceptable speed. The 533MHz processor
is slow, but usable. The real show-stopper is the 64MB of RAM. At least
256MB is needed; some people, depending on what apps they run, need even
more.

And most people would find that a 6GB hard drive is also a very serious
limitation.

Although he might be able to upgrade these components, it's probably cheaper
and a better idea to buy a new computer from someplace like Dell.
 
Hi director:

My opinion is NO. By the time you have chased down every little inadequacy
and conflict between this hardware and XP, you will have spent, in time and
money, what a new or slightly used laptop would cost.
 
JWH said:
Hi, my neighbour has a five year old sony vaio pcg-f801 with milenium os.
533MHz, ram 64mb and hardrive 6gb. he seems to be getting endless trouble
especially with his belkin wireless adapter connection. would it be a
good idea to upgrade to windows xp with such an old pc?
Click to expand...
No, XP will not run the computer faster. By the time that he installs a
much bigger disk and much more memory, he will have spent enough to buy a
new laptop.
Jim
 
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