Running windows 7 on a 7 year old computer

lincsman

lincsman

Member
Hi there. In spite of my words of concern, a friend insisted that I install windows 7 on his laptop. If I had a copy of windows xp, I would just install that. Anyhow, we don't have a copy of windows xp and his laptop has now been reformatted (had so many viruses, I had to, maybe I shouldn't have reformatted and just installed windows so that he would have had a choice) and now has windows 7 32-bit installed.

Anyways, it runs well for about 5-20 minutes and then slows right down. I figure that if I go into msconfig, I can shut down services, but I don't know what services to shut down and what not to, and I don't even know if that's the problem. I'm sure it would help though. So, what should I do? Thanks in advance,
 
beers

beers

Moderator
Staff member
Probably lack of RAM related. Swapping data to virtual memory on the hard drive destroys any expectation of performance.
 
lincsman

lincsman

Member
I recommended he install more RAM but he doesn't want to. He has a centrino 2Ghz processor, I didn't run CPU-Z but it's either dual core or hyperthreaded. 2GB of RAM an an ATI x1600 video card.
 
spirit

spirit

Moderator
Staff member
A RAM upgrade and maybe replace the HDD with an SSD (if it's a SATA machine) is about all you can do. Windows 7 will run on this PC but not very quickly.
 
lincsman

lincsman

Member
I changed the settings to performance so it will run faster, recommended he upgrade his RAM which he says he doesn't want to do, and told him about msconfig so that he can shut down services to his heart's content. Not much else I can do. I think getting a SSD is a little overkill because it won't make it run much faster, the CPU and RAM will bottleneck. I do however have a SSD on my computer and it is much better for C: than a HDD.
 
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