Olde laptoppe

Justin Passing

Justin Passing

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Lenovo about 11 years old. Intel i7 8GB, can't remember the clock speed but maybe 1.7Ghz.
Win 7 getting ever slower, especially on start. It reports a Windows Service not available on startup, but I can't remember which...

It's currently dead because the power jack failed. I have a new one (£6)
It's a tad chunky but was ok, even the battery.
Plan is to put a 500 ssd in and use Win10.
For running Office, Adobe CS, graphicsy stuff, and that.

Sound viable or is it too old? Snags?

Thanks gents
 
Yep that's perfectly viable.

I have an 11 year old zoostorm i5 with 32gb ram, think it's clocked at 1,6ghz,

Win 10 and the SSD drive and it's like new.

My pc at work 7 years old and has 8gb ram and is only an i3 processor at 1.3ghz with an SSD and that handles everything I chuck at it. It's not great for graphics work, but I have abiut 20 windows open and bounce around them no problem and create pdf's etc
 
Excellent, thanks.

W10 has got to a position of being grudgingly accepted as OK, I think!
 
It seems to be fine - noticeably faster than Win7.
I should have put a 1TB SSD in though. After putting progs back in (what a pain) more than half of the 500GB is used. 256/500gb tiny USB drives are getting cheaper though so I may plug one in permanently.
 
My first PC had a 210mb hard drive. It was a 486 SX25 with 4mb of ram. I paid over £1,000 for it. Many others at the time were 386 models with 40gb hard drives. My Brother in Law who knew about all things computery said I would NEVER get that hard drive anywhere near full. I later added a double speed CD drive and I also paid £75 for a secondhand 4mb ram chip (a bargain as ram was about £50 per mb at the time) which really made it fly!
 
Mottie said:
My first PC had a 210mb hard drive. It was a 486 SX25 with 4mb of ram. I paid over £1,000 for it. Many others at the time were 386 models with 40gb hard drives. My Brother in Law who knew about all things computery said I would NEVER get that hard drive anywhere near full. I later added a double speed CD drive and I also paid £75 for a secondhand 4mb ram chip (a bargain as ram was about £50 per mb at the time) which really made it fly!
Click to expand...

Ha ha the good old days,

(I presume you meant 40mb not GB)

I remember the original office suites had about 50 floppy discs to load on the computer one after the other lol
 
sxturbo said:
I remember the original office suites had about 50 floppy discs to load on the computer one after the other lol
Click to expand...

I remember programs on paper tape.

First you had to key in a few instructions that enabled the machine to read characters from the tape.
Then you could load a bootstrap program from paper tape.
Then you could load the application program.

https://www.pdp-11.nl/peripherals/how-to-bootstrap.html said:
How to load a bootstrap program into the memory of a PDP-11.
  • Set the ENABLE/HALT switch to the HALT position.
  • Set the first address (often 001000) in the switch register.
  • Press the LOAD ADDR switch.
  • Set the contents of the first address (from the table below)
    in the switch register.
  • Lift the DEP switch.
    The computer automatically advances to the next address.
  • Set the contents for the next address (from the table below)
    in the switch register.
  • Lift the DEP switch.
  • Repeat the last two steps until you have deposited all the instructions.

How to verify the deposited bootstrap loader program.

    • Set the first address (001000) in the switch register.
    • Press the LOAD ADDR switch.
    • Press the EXAM switch to display the contents of that address
      in the DATA register.
    • Compare the value in the DATA register with the value from
      the table below.
    • If the values are the same press EXAM again to display the contents of the next address.
      If the values are not the same repeat the steps of the bootstrap load description.
How to start the bootstrap program (the computer).

    • Set the start address (001000) in the switch register.
    • Press the LOAD ADDR switch.
    • Set the ENABLE/HALT switch to ENABLE.
    • Press the START switch.
Click to expand...
 
I'd add RAM to my not-so-old Lenovo Yoga which only ships with 4Gb, but last time I tried the order couldn't be fulfilled in over 40 days. Sodding covid affecting chip supply :(
 
Mottie said:
My first PC had a 210mb hard drive. It was a 486 SX25 with 4mb of ram. I paid over £1,000 for it. Many others at the time were 386 models with 40gb hard drives. My Brother in Law who knew about all things computery said I would NEVER get that hard drive anywhere near full. I later added a double speed CD drive and I also paid £75 for a secondhand 4mb ram chip (a bargain as ram was about £50 per mb at the time) which really made it fly!
Click to expand...
Ha ha. In 1992 I left my first fulltime job where my manager tried to keep me offering a 386 with the maths co-pro. Oooh, I thought, already pretty sure 486 was already a thing in '92 :)
 
I replaced (delegated my Win10 to 2nd division) Acer, which has a 1Gb HDD and 8Mb, with a new laptop with 1Gb 8Mb and a 256 SSD. The boot up and general speed difference is quite amazing compared to it's predecessor. It was suggested that it would be worth changing the Acer to SSD, but I didn't want the aggravation, besides, the Acer was falling to bits.
 
I built my first PC in 1991, a 286 with two floppy drives, one 720KB and 1 360KB. Total memory 1MB (one megabyte) of which the maximun of 640KB was used by DOS 3.3 and the remaining 384K was used as a RAMDRIVE so the boot disk could be removed. By late 1993 I was able to afford a 20MB Conner IDE drive, which was a vast improvement. The programs I was using at the time were Wordstar 4, Lotus 123 and GWBASIC. I now have SSD drives in my desktop PC and my laptop, and my desktop sometimes struggles with 16GB RAM! How times have changed.
 
Astra99 said:
I now have SSD drives in my desktop PC and my laptop, and my desktop sometimes struggles with 16GB RAM! How times have changed.
Click to expand...

I go back much further, to 1975 and yes - How times change'. I used to build to the point of soldering them together and program myself in machine code etc..

Why would anyone need more than 1Kbyte of memory?
 
My first pc was an IBM XT/8088 with 256mb of memory and dual 5.25" floppies.
That was an upgrade after the orange screened dumb terminal I used for packet radio.

The 25mb RLL (or was it mfm?) hard drive I had was super big storage at the time.

I have just been discussing the mother in laws laptop which has a HDD thats starting to fail, I think an SSD, more RAM and Win10 will be in order rather than spending hundreds on a new pc.
 
mattylad said:
My first pc was an IBM XT/8088 with 256mb of memory and dual 5.25" floppies.
Click to expand...

I progressed from 300baud audio cassettes, through S100 floopies I imported from US (a continuous tape system) which I had to design an interface for, 5.25 with sh 5Mb MFM, then 3.25 720k to 1.44. I missed out on 8" floppies.
 
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