Glacially slow Win7 - where it is now
A while ago some of you offered good advice regarding my glacially slow Win7 netbook. Thanks.
I finally got around to parting with some hard earned and changed the hard drive to a SSD type. Before doing this I had removed all of my non OS files from the machine and then done a "return to factory" backup from the D drive partition. Initially this appeared to have done the trick but I soon found that the usual OS updates started to happen and I couldn't bring myself to stop them. As they are always described as "important" by Microshaft and I have no way to tell which, if any, I need to have I just let it get on with it. While this was going on the machine was nearly as slow as before ...... I then found that the original version of Firefox was not up to dealing with the features of many of the newer websites so I upgraded FF and I was back to where I was last November. The World Wide Wait was at its slowest. I tried changing browser. IE was no faster, Cyberfox was a little quicker but not by much.
Today, I have swapped out the hard drive for an SSD. Samsung have a free to download programme which takes the pain out of cloning the original hard drive. You do need to arrange a second drive bay, a disk caddy does the job, it takes about an hour to transfer the contents to the SSD. It took me a while to open the case and swap the hard disk for the SSD and then the moment of truth.
The machine powered up a bit more quickly than I am used to but then immediately required a re-boot to finish the transfer process. After the second boot up it didn't seem to be much faster than it was yesterday but I suspect that there was still some stuff going on relating to the setting up of the SSD. It then installed some new drivers, not sure what for and called for another reboot. Now it has been on and working for a couple of hours it has settled down. It is a little quicker now, it even managed to play a music video from ewetoob without struggling although it was slow to start playing. Once it started I opened another browser (Cyberfox) tab and it let me read the BBC news without the music sound track getting interrupted or pausing. I don't know if the video side of it played smoothly as it was not in view.
So for now the machine is quick enough to be worth using. I don't suppose it will be long before the software expands to drag it down again. I can't help wondering whether Linux Mint with Firefox would offer a faster browsing experience at the expense of some programmes which are Windoze only, like the GPS update software and some CAD stuff I use.
Has anyone made the change from Win7 to Linux Mint, both with Firefox, and can offer evidence of speed improvement or not? Ta.