upgrading five year old laptop

  • Thread starter Thread starter JWH
  • Start date Start date
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...

A great idea would be to install Ubuntu Linux on it, which is a far better
operating system than XP.
 
Jim said:
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
Click to expand...
Mmmm!!

256mb ram - £46.98 including vat & del (Crucial)

40GB samsung drive - £42.94 including vat & del. (Scan)

Where are you buying new laptops for that money???

:o)
 
Been there, done that. Good luck getting the hardware on that laptop
working with Linux.
 
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...

Put a 128mb so-dimm in the other slot and it will be fine.
 
With 64 megs of ram it will run slow.
Click to expand...


I don't think such a machine will even run Windows XP. I believe the
specs are below the XP minimum.

It may be time for him to give consideration to donating his computer
to the local charity and investing $1,200 to $1,500 in a relatively
modern computer, if it's a laptop.

IF it's a desktop, he could get a decent machine for under $1,000.

As for Millennium, it presents a world of issues all by itself. The
FIRST thing I'd recommend would be to acquire Windows 98 SE.

Good luck!


Talahassee.
 
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...

Possible. But You NEED more RAM.

For older machines, I like Windows2000 instead. It still needs more
ram, 128MB at least.
Less bloat, you can have access to more of that 6Gig HDD.

I consider removing windows ME to be a worthwhile endevour on general
principles even if you're replacing it with windows 98se.
 
Talahassee said:
I don't think such a machine will even run Windows XP. I believe the
specs are below the XP minimum.

It may be time for him to give consideration to donating his computer
to the local charity and investing $1,200 to $1,500 in a relatively
modern computer, if it's a laptop.

IF it's a desktop, he could get a decent machine for under $1,000.

As for Millennium, it presents a world of issues all by itself. The
FIRST thing I'd recommend would be to acquire Windows 98 SE.

Good luck!
Click to expand...



The specs are baseline minimum for XP RTM - not for XP SP2, IIRC - MS
adjusted the minimum RAM from 64 MB to 128MB along the way
with enough RAM, there wouldn't be a problem on that box... but putting
256MB (the maxi it'd take) in there would be expensive, since it's 133MHz
SODIMM.....hmmm, not as expensive as I thought!
http://www.crucial.com/store/listpa...r=Sony&tabid=AM&model=VAIO+PCG-F801&submit=Go
$34 for a 128MB stick!
either way, with a 533MHz CPU, the machine isn't going to exactly fly with
XP - but it'll run ME very nicely with just the one 128MB stick - hopefully
with or without the existing 64MB one.
Downgrading to 98SE is unnecessary, and irrelevant. Most of ME's 'problems'
are induced by people trying to tweak it the same way that they tweaked
Win98, and failing - or by installing Norton crapware on it..

--
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
 
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. Not enough ram or hard drive space.
 
Back
Top