A simple way to upgrade an old laptop

[Provost]

What do you recommend?

CCleaner (Piriform) has been taken over by Avast, a commercial antivirus concern. It is said that the more recent iterations of CCleaner are no longer as clean and best avoided.

I use BleachBit, which is a free and open-source alternative. It has not caused me any grief.

ETA: It is probably a good deal more thorough than CCleaner and for this reason it should be used with a little care by new users until they become comfortable with it. Create a restore point before use and take notice of what check boxes you're ticking. Don't just automatically tick everything.

 

[exbluejob]

CCleaner (Piriform) has been taken over by Avast, a commercial antivirus concern. It is said that the more recent iterations of CCleaner are no longer as clean and best avoided.

I use BleachBit, which is a free and open-source alternative. It has not caused me any grief.

ETA: It is probably a good deal more thorough than CCleaner and for this reason it should be used with a little care by new users until they become comfortable with it. Create a restore point before use and take notice of what check boxes you're ticking. Don't just automatically tick everything.

I was using ccleaner since it was named Crap Cleaner and you downloaded it from File Hippo Running BleachBit now but (it did warn me) it's very slow. Will be interested in the results, 30 mins remaining.

 

[anglo]

Morning folks,

My wife and I (with the I taking an advisory role, obviously) decided to buy my son an old laptop for his 9th birthday as a kind of My First Computer type thing. He's getting plenty of IT stuff from school and is reasonably adept on my PC, so it seemed a good step forward. She came home with a Dell Vostro 15-3568, which is so painfully slow as to be unusable. I'd like to make it workable and am wondering about the best way to do this. It's been suggested to me that I slap in an SSD (both cheap and Youtubable), is that the best way forward? Would upgrading the RAM help at all?

I'm a novice and it seems a good chance to sit down with him and have a bit of father/son learning time, I'm just not 100% sure of what to pull out and replace.

Thanks

I'm a novice and it seems a good chance to sit down with him and have a bit of father/son learning time, I'm just not 100% sure of what to pull out and replace.

Google Mr Memory, There are others, they can scan your computer, and tell you the present state of your
computer and what upgrades are available, work out what you want to do, and search YouTube on how to fit
the bits to your computer.
Mr Memory used to have videos on how to do it, maybe they still do

 

[exbluejob]

I was using ccleaner since it was named Crap Cleaner and you downloaded it from File Hippo Running BleachBit now but (it did warn me) it's very slow. Will be interested in the results, 30 mins remaining.

30 mins finished, now saying 48 mins remaining. Hhhmmm, is my drive being wiped?

 

[exbluejob]

Took circa 45 mins for each Disk (I have 4) but finished now and:
Disk space recovered: 13.09GB
Files deleted: 8453
Special operations: 54

Will be quicker in the future as I won't need to fully clean every disk.

 

[Roadster280]

Took circa 45 mins for each Disk (I have 4) but finished now and:
Disk space recovered: 13.09GB
Files deleted: 8453
Special operations: 54

Will be quicker in the future as I won't need to fully clean every disk.

I doubt that software is very popular in Ukraine. Decreasingly so in Russia, no doubt

 

[TamH70]

Morning folks,

My wife and I (with the I taking an advisory role, obviously) decided to buy my son an old laptop for his 9th birthday as a kind of My First Computer type thing. He's getting plenty of IT stuff from school and is reasonably adept on my PC, so it seemed a good step forward. She came home with a Dell Vostro 15-3568, which is so painfully slow as to be unusable. I'd like to make it workable and am wondering about the best way to do this. It's been suggested to me that I slap in an SSD (both cheap and Youtubable), is that the best way forward? Would upgrading the RAM help at all?

I'm a novice and it seems a good chance to sit down with him and have a bit of father/son learning time, I'm just not 100% sure of what to pull out and replace.

Thanks

I found this manual from Dell that basically goes step-by-step through changing every bit of kit on your kid's laptop. Down to where exactly all the case screws are and so on:

https://dl.dell.com/topicspdf/vostro-15-3568-laptop_owners-manual_en-us.pdf

On the new RAM question, and whether or not it will make the thing run quicker, well, I'd say yes, it will, but don't expect miracles. My current PC which I'm using to type this on is an ancient, and I do mean ancient, Dell Opteron with a Pentium D dual-core CPU - thwacking the full eight gigabytes of RAM that it could take makes it able to run Windows 10 64-bit rather well, though rather slowly, whereas it wouldn't even run it before. I haven't yet upgraded the system drive to an SSD. You will get better performance with one of those too as well, my advice would be to get the fastest one that your laptop can run without going overboard on the cost.

 

[exbluejob]

Depends if you have an M2 slot (unlikely I suppose):
Amazon product


External one, not expensive:

https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/crucial-ct500x6ssd9-x6-500gb-portable-ssd-up-to-540-mbs-usb-32-external-solid-state-drive-usb-c-ps5199-at-amazon-3938312

2TB for only 150 sovs guv'ner!

Crucial MX500 2TB 2.5" SATA III SSD - CT2000MX500SSD1

Low cost SSD with a capacity of 2TB With Super Rapid performance due to it's SATA III interface and super Quick 560Mbps read speed ., Mfg Code: CT2000MX500SSD1

www.cclonline.com

 

[DrDave]

What do you recommend?

I use the Flag cookies firefox addon.

 

[Provost]

I was using ccleaner since it was named Crap Cleaner and you downloaded it from File Hippo Running BleachBit now but (it did warn me) it's very slow. Will be interested in the results, 30 mins remaining.

I've never found it particularly slow, never more than about 2 - 3 mins, although I think if you had a bit of a sluggish processor and a lot sitting on your HD it could slow things down considerably. There's a fair bit more going on under the hood compared with CCleaner.

When I used CCleaner I used an add-on called CCEnhancer which, I think, added an ini file to the CCleaner process for a more thorough cleanup. That would slow down the CCleaner process time considerably.

 

[exbluejob]

I've never found it particularly slow, never more than about 2 - 3 mins, although I think if you had a bit of a sluggish processor and a lot sitting on your HD it could slow things down considerably. There's a fair bit more going on under the hood compared with CCleaner.

When I used CCleaner I used an add-on called CCEnhancer which, I think, added an ini file to the CCleaner process for a more thorough cleanup. That would slow down the CCleaner process time considerably.

Took about 3.5 hours in total but I'm sure it was 'cleaning' the 'empty' areas of my disks.

 

[endure]

Took circa 45 mins for each Disk (I have 4) but finished now and:
Disk space recovered: 13.09GB
Files deleted: 8453
Special operations: 54

Will be quicker in the future as I won't need to fully clean every disk.

If it's running Windows 32 bit there's no point in having more than 4Gb of RAM in it as Windows can't use it.

 

[exbluejob]

If it's running Windows 32 bit there's no point in having more than 4Gb of RAM in it as Windows can't use it.

64 but thanks

 

[Provost]

Took about 3.5 hours in total but I'm sure it was 'cleaning' the 'empty' areas of my disks.

Yes that would take ages , especially if they were full of accumlated clutter. One of the boxes to uncheck before proceeding with the clean.

I also wonder whether cleaning free disk space is any good for a SSD as it sounds as if the process probably involves 'write' cycles. I think TRIM is the method of choice. I'm not sure if BleachBit identifies a SSD and engages TRIM to 'clean' unused disk space.

 

[exbluejob]

Yes that would take ages , especially if they were full of accumlated clutter. One of the boxes to uncheck before proceeding with the clean.

I also wonder whether cleaning free disk space is any good for a SSD as it sounds as if the process probably involves 'write' cycles. I think TRIM is the method of choice. I'm not sure if BleachBit identifies a SSD and engages TRIM to 'clean' unused disk space.

Not sure on the cleaning either but it'll be a one off, no need next time. Interestingly, unlike Crap Cleaner I didn't have to individually log into every Web page again.

 

[truck_trasher]

As widely agreed, changing the hard-disk for an SSD is the biggest improvement per pound. A replacement SSD from any reputable brand (Samsung, Intel, Crucial, Kingston, Sandisk) will have a drive-imaging program included, either by having it on the SSD (ready to put on a bootable USB-key) or as a download from the manufacturer's website. One uses this program and an external disk-caddy to make an image of the 'old' hard-disk on the 'new' SSD so that it can be directly swapped. When the new SSD is installed, use the increase in speed to make a Windows re-install (from Dells hidden partition and restore tools) much quicker than doing the same thing on the hard-disk before the copying.

If the user doesn't specifically need a version of Windows, then just take out the hard-disk, insert the SSD, and install Ubuntu linux on it. If you find it doesn't do what he needs for school/college, then do the disk-image as described above and continue with Windows.

Note that if the machine has Windows 7 it is probably too old to use, though it could possibly be 'upgraded' (newer security level at least) to Windows-10 depending on how old it really is. Forget about Windows 11.

Most machines will be happier with 8GB of ram than with 4GB. You will have to check if the ram is in a socket (or two) or soldered on the board. If there is socketed ram, it may be that all the sockets are filled (meaning you would need to replace all the memory-chips to increase the total) rather than having one socket empty which you could then fill with the appropriate amount of ram -- typically doubling the amount from 4 to 8GB.

Once the machine is sorted out, get the youngster a small third-party Arduino kit (under thirty quid) for him to practice programming useful stuff.

 

[Trackpen]

KISS.
Somebody once told me the best way is to make sure you have good household insurance .

 

[endure]

Most machines will be happier with 8GB of ram than with 4GB.

Unless they're running a 32 bit operating system.

 

[truck_trasher]

Unless they're running a 32 bit operating system.

In which case a museum might be interested? Is that Vostro really so ancient?!!!

 

[endure]

In which case a museum might be interested? Is that Vostro really so ancient?!!!

It's not the machine it's the operating system. 32 bit operating systems can only manage 4GB of memory space regardless of the machine they're running on.