Old laptop - very slow to boot up

maccaz

Hi all
my friend has given me a laptop of his.
It has a 14gb hard drive and 256mb ram (told you it was old)
It wouldn't start for him. I got it started using safe-mode (eventually).
His daughter had 10gb of music on there I got that deleted.
I installed registry cleaner (eusing free registry cleaner). I then defragged the hard-drive.
When I start it up it can still take an hour or more.
He says that it was never used for the internet. He only wants it to keep documents/photos, run a few powerpoints etc. nothing to taxing.

Is there anything else I can do with it to speed it up, or is it for the bin?

Thanks

Sean

fwor

The problem with old laptops like that is that it generally isn't justifiable (or even possible sometimes) to upgrade the memory, but no current Windows variant will work happily in 256 Mb.

You don't say what OS it currently has - if it's something like Win 98 then reinstalling from scratch should give reasonable performance, but protecting it from malware (even if you don't go online) will not be easy.

Personally I'd put one of the small Linux variants on it. If he really does only do a small number of different things he will soon get used to the Linux equivalent (e.g. OpenOffice to edit/create Powerpoint presentations).

I currently use Xubuntu (a slightly cut down version of Ubuntu) on an old laptop and it's performance is fine - it will run Ok with 256 Mb.

bingo_bango

I have an old IBM Thinkpad 600E which also has 256Mb RAM. I run XP on it and no serious issues. Does take 5 mins to boot but it runs fairly OK (considering it's an antique!) after that.

You're still as well looking at Linux distros though.