last chance to redeem itself
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?