last chance to redeem itself

[rans6andrew]

Situation is Samsung N220plus netbook, bought new 2011. It is running Win7 home basic (I think). It had been slowing to glacial speeds for some years and I lived with it 'cos I have other machines and it is good for a few specific tasks. It still runs for many hours on it's battery (no mains power available) so is good for doing W&B calculations at the airfield and small enough to carry in the aircraft when touring.

Anyway, I finally got around to backing up all of stuff I had added to the machine and made a list of all of the additional software I had installed etc and then I did a restore back to how the machine was 2 weeks after it left the factory. So far, so good. When it restarted it was immediately apparent that it was back to full speed. It had all of the original load plus Firefox, an early version which seemed to work OK on some websites.

Then I tried to do the BBC news on line - the format was all to pot and some menu items failed to work. I then tried my preferred freeview tv guide, it failed to load the whole page, failed to work links within the page and failed to do the "hover over" additional info boxes. I then got a fresh install of a new version of Firefox and now the BBC news page loads and views correctly, the freeview tv guide loads and views correctly but....... it is back to glacial slowness. Aaaarrrgh.

Any idea where I can go from here?

I have one or two thoughts.

Some people have suggested that Gurgle Chrome might do less to drag the machine down, can anyone confirm this or suggest another alternative browser? Firefox had much the same effect on a Samsung tablet recently.

If all else fails I might just ditch the Windows altogether and stick Linux Mint on the machine. This will do all of the tasks I do while running away from mains power using Open Office. Again I don't know if the speed will be poor especially if I go with Firefox which I prefer. Anyone?

[themidge]

Google Chrome tends to be pretty resource heavy. Installing Linux would be a very good option, almost always outperforms Windows on older hardware. Alternatively, install the max amount of RAM possible (which is likely to be 2GB on a netbook, can always check crucial.com) and a solid state drive. Depending on what you pick you could possibly do both for around £60.

[andytug]

Worth trying Linux Mint on it. I have a Toshiba NB100, cost buttons secondhand and came with Win 7 which was sslllllloooowww.... Probably due to the Windows update issue (sends CPU to 100% whilst doing nothing, for hours) fix now available for this, but I got bored and stuck Mint on it. If all you need it for is web surfing and office stuff it's absolutely fine. Even got Google Drive working on it this week, slightly faffy (Dropbox works out of the er..... box) but after a Google and a couple of code lines, it works fine.

[rans6andrew]

I have had the full compliment of additional RAM installed almost since the off. I do use the machine for updating three varieties of GPS and a ham radio operating system which I guess don't need to be done on this particular Windoze PC, they can't be done on my Linux Mint desktop (update utilities only available for Win or Mac OS) but I can work around this. I might check out the SSD but I am unclear about shifting the Win7 off the hard drive onto an SSD without cocking up the licence. The magic licence number label on the bottom of the machine has worn down to be unreadable....... The backup OS is on the D partition of the HDD, will this cause transfer/re-install problems?

[themidge]

With the right software it is possible to shift everything from the HDD to the SSD without Windows even recognising the change. I've used Acronis in the past for such purposes. Regarding the licence key, there are utilities available online that will retrieve it from the registry.

[nzaviate]

You can try Cyberfox as your browser, less resource hog than Firefox.

[rans6andrew]

when the machine gets really slow I see from the task manager that the cpu is maxed out but the ram is always trundling along at about 50%. Would this suggest that disk access and swap space is not part of the bottleneck?

If so, getting a faster disk accesss by SDD will have little effect upon speed once all applications have launched fully. Getting it to boot up in a shorter time might be worth it. The jury is still out.

I just checked out the C and D drives in the machine (partitions on same physical drive) and am surprised to see that D drive, which only has 11GB of OS backup files, is 120GB total. C drive is a mere 91GB of space. Why would the D partition be bigger than the C partition? In fact the spare space on D partition is bigger than the entire C partition. Good reason or Friday afternoon, back from the pub, build?

[rans6andrew]

nzaviate, I have had a play with cyberfox, it doesn't seem to be as quick as ordinary firefox. I note that the benefits of cyberfox seem to be mostly when running on 64bit hardware. My poor old Sam netboox doesn't have enough grunt for it. The struggle is also website dependant, I find the tvguide.co.uk website slows every browser down, especially if the computer under it is already struggling.

[boguing]

One thing that might be worth a try is to uninstall Firefox again and then get CCleaner to do a cleanup and then a registry clean. I usually do that duo two or three times as one seems to free stuff up for the other to find next time round. I'm just wondering if the rollback didn't actually delete the Firefox files and the FF installer found them and didn't bother writing over them thoroughly?


If that doesn't work, and I don't often agree with people that suggest doing a fresh Windows installation, but I think it may just be the easiest thing to do, especially since you've taken it back to near 'as new'. Get the SSD and it'll be done in no time. I can send you a Win7 disc if you haven't got one.

CCleaner (get the free one) here:- https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

[rans6andrew]

A week ago I re-installed win7 from the D partition on the hard disk by reverting to the "new machine condition". This removed most of the stuff I had added to the machine but it didn't remove some of my photos or remove an early version of Firefox.

Boguing, I'll give the suggested manual file uninstall/removal FF trick and CC clean up. Kind of you to offer Win7 on disc, is there a benefit to having this rather than use the one on the D partition?

[VP959]

Originally Posted by boguing

One thing that might be worth a try is to uninstall Firefox again and then get CCleaner to do a cleanup and then a registry clean. I usually do that duo two or three times as one seems to free stuff up for the other to find next time round. I'm just wondering if the rollback didn't actually delete the Firefox files and the FF installer found them and didn't bother writing over them thoroughly?


If that doesn't work, and I don't often agree with people that suggest doing a fresh Windows installation, but I think it may just be the easiest thing to do, especially since you've taken it back to near 'as new'. Get the SSD and it'll be done in no time. I can send you a Win7 disc if you haven't got one.

CCleaner (get the free one) here:- https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

Is there any (legal) way to download a copy of Win 7? I have an old 64 bit Win 7 machine that is behaving very like Andrews, and although I've cleaned out loads of old stuff, used CC Cleaner (I too, think that it's very good, BTW), it still runs slowly at times. I don't use it much, but keep it as it's the only machine I have that will run AutoCad (all the others are running Linux Mint).

Sadly the machine didn't come with any means of doing a truly "clean" Win 7 re-install, as it was originally heavily customised by Lenevo, with stacks of junk stuff that I got rid of, and the system restore option doesn't seem to be a clean install on a separate drive partition, AFAICS. I do have the original and correct Win 7 key, and quite like the idea of building a custom install with all the useful and essential updates slipstreamed in, but not including all the spyware updates (all the "telemetry" stuff that Microsoft added to Win 7 over the past year or two, via "optional updates", without giving details as to what the updates were really doing).

I wonder if one thing that could be slowing an older 32 bit machine, like Andrew's, down might be the overhead added by the "telemetry" updates? When I discovered that Microsoft had just sent these out without proper warning, I first got a bit angry, then spent a good hour removing a dozen or so "telemetry" updates and "customer experience program" updates, blocked all the offending Microsoft data collection servers on my router (there are around 20 servers collecting data from the various telemetry functions that Microsoft have added), cleaned up the PC and it did run noticeably faster. It may be that the extra overhead of sending all that personal data back to Microsoft might slow down an older machine, TBH I'm just not sure, as the slight speed up could be just because I used CC Cleaner after getting rid of a lot of stuff.

[Procrastinus]

'Is there any (legal) way to download a copy of Win 7?'

Try this:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/soft...nload/windows7

[le Pingouin]

Procrastinus, I don't think that will let you download using an OEM product key.

This handy tool will download the ISO of your choice direct from MS, no product key required:

https://www.heidoc.net/joomla/techno...-download-tool

Personally I'd try a test installation using the product key you have on a separate hard drive in case it doesn't work.

[boguing]

Originally Posted by rans6andrew

A week ago I re-installed win7 from the D partition on the hard disk by reverting to the "new machine condition". This removed most of the stuff I had added to the machine but it didn't remove some of my photos or remove an early version of Firefox.

Boguing, I'll give the suggested manual file uninstall/removal FF trick and CC clean up. Kind of you to offer Win7 on disc, is there a benefit to having this rather than use the one on the D partition?

The only advantage in doing it from a disc is mentioned by VP959 in that there may be extras built in that you don't want in your OEM version. I wouldn't worry about that though because it's easy enough to get rid of them. I don't think that the telemetry he mentions should trouble a reasonably able pc either.

So, in short, I reckon your install from the hidden partition should be fine, and I hope that the CCleaner thing worked.

[VP959]

Originally Posted by le Pingouin

Procrastinus, I don't think that will let you download using an OEM product key.

This handy tool will download the ISO of your choice direct from MS, no product key required:

https://www.heidoc.net/joomla/techno...-download-tool

Personally I'd try a test installation using the product key you have on a separate hard drive in case it doesn't work.

Originally Posted by Procrastinus

'Is there any (legal) way to download a copy of Win 7?'

Try this:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/soft...nload/windows7

Thanks, both of you. I have a spare new drive for another project, so I'll try it on that first, as suggested.

I extracted the key from the OEM installed version on the machine, so with luck it should work OK.

[VP959]

As an additional observation to the above advice, I can offer the following tips when it comes to getting a genuine Win 7 iso. First of all, the direct link to the Microsoft website above wouldn't let me download the iso, even though I have a valid product key, extracted from my PC, as it's an OEM install. I rang Microsoft to confirm this, and they told me that the only way for me to get hold of the Win 7 iso for my machine was from Lenovo, as it was an OEM version installed at manufacture.

The link from le Pingouin wouldn't work at first, as I removed Internet Explorer years ago, and it only works if you have internet Explorer 11, apparently. After I downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 11 the utility programme seems to work OK and I've now downloaded the last version of Win 7, with SP1, from the Microsoft website using it.

I've also downloaded the latest convenience roll up, and worked out how to remove all the added telemetry updates from it. The next task will be to create a slipstreamed iso with Win 7 SP1, plus all the latest updates, minus the telemetry ones, that I will probably put on a bootable USB.

Then I'll swap out the hard drive for the new spare I have and do a clean install and see how it goes.

For Andrew's benefit (if he hasn't already done this), I will try and see what sort of speed differences there are between the old and new installations. My gut feeling is that a new, clean, install should run faster. One reason for thinking that is that I've noticed, even after running CC Cleaner, that there are still a lot of legacy software installation bits and bobs around, with loads of empty directories and a fair few registry entries that don't seem to relate to anything now, left over from when I've installed software and then removed it.

The worst seems to be from Office 2007. I bought a copy of Office 2007 some years ago, to replace Office 2003. However. I simply couldn't use it; the "ribbon" drove me nuts, and it was taking me far, far to long to find out how to do really simple stuff that I was very familiar with, so I uninstalled Office 2007 and reinstalled Office 2003. However, it seems that Office 2007 failed to properly uninstall, and left stuff all over the place, including a load of what look like recent Microsoft updates that only apply to Office 2007.

Hopefully when I've finished, I should get the machine back to something like it was when I first bought it, several years ago. That will suit me jsut fine, as I rarely use it; it's been dual boot for years, and runs Linux Mint 99% of the time. It only gets booted into Win 7 when I want to run Autocad, and AutoCad was far too expensive for me to just dispose of and learn something new that would run on Linux.

Thanks for the advice, and my apologies for butting in on Andrew's thread.

[rans6andrew]

I now know one of the reasons for the re-installed machine going slow, again. It was busy installing even more updates in the background. Last evening it suddenly went into "installing updates" mode, closing my applications and saying do not switch off. This went on for more than an hour and I left it to it and went to bed. Today it is running slow and svchost is using 60% cpu. I didn't see it until I selected "all users" stuff in task manager.

Can someone remind me of the thing you need to run to stop Win 10 installing? I seem to have mislaid it in the re-install process.

[Loose rivets]

Steve Gibson's Never 10. Masses on Google, though I'm not sure of the need now the free period is over.

[rans6andrew]

Ta, I'll get it anyway, rather than have to go through the tedium of removing it if it does inflict me.