Win10 or Win8 - should I upgrade?
I keep seeing stuff about problems being caused by Win10 upgrading, something you can't stop occurring unless you pay for the professional version of Win10. I am also getting it in the neck from my Father-in-law whose Win10 laptop upgrades and screws things every few months. The latest round of stuff last week has messed with his Fitbit App and we have yet to find out if his printer driver is screwed up - again. His Firefox also upgraded at the same time, which he was not aware of except that it "wasn't working at all well". He gave up and dumped his PC and his Fitbit on me to sort out.
Due to a "job lot purchase" in the sales a couple of years ago I have the same model of laptop PC as FIL. Mine is still running Win8, as they both were when bought. I missed the option to take the free Win10 upgrade due to my machine being away for repair for some weeks while the offer was running and I didn't find out about it until too late. Anyway, my machine is getting to be a bit troublesome. It often has unresponsive windows even when it is only being called upon to run Mailwasher and Thunderbird. If I click a link in an email which needs a browser (Firefox is the default) or Adobe Acrobat reader to open I might as well walk around the block as nothing seems to be happening for a long time. It usually gets there in the end but it is not right. After checking the obvious (to me) stuff like CPU percentage use, memory or network activity and finding nothing I put my problem to a few folk on a Zoom meeting last evening. They have suggested either fetching a fresh install of Win8, upgrading to Win10 or looking for disk access performance.
I have also looked at hard disk performance and there are some issues. The average access time while the machine is booting up goes up to big numbers of milliseconds, sometimes over 10 seconds, which can't be good. I have run defrag, scanned with Malwarebytes and Ccleaner then someone suggested Adwcleaner and Glarysoft. Many issues were found, mostly with the registry, and removed by the latter two apps but the machine still struggles. The disk capacity used is only 200GB out of 900GB total.
The final suggestion was to swap out the drive for a SSD type. I did this on a Win7 netbook and it didn't make a vast difference, only prolonging the inevitable for a few months.
The machine is i7 based with 8Gb RAM. It is a later generation i7 than my workshop/office desktop machine which positively flies in comparison but it is running Linux Mint 18.x although it is much busier most of the time.
So, should I do Win10 or Win8? Anyone?
In the good old days, when you formatted a hard disk it used to do a test of every byte of every sector on the disk surface and it saved a bad sector list to the disk. The disk operating system used to refer to this list and avoid trying to save data to the bad sectors. Do any of the disk utilities still allow a full test of the disk surface and bad sector avoidance? I have not lost any data but I am getting suspicious of the hard drive.................... Anyone?
Thanks,
Rans6...........