Samsung 204B

custardy

David_Aston wrote: »

Thank you both. Is the relevance of the hdmi on telly, in order to test if the Adapter would work, in my circumstances Custardy? The tele is nowhere near the computer.
EveryWhere, naturally the free from Dell sounds attractive. Could I load it onto one of my three external drives? Only at USB 2 speeds mind.
I guess I should be able to follow a guide, although as I type this my wife is shaking her head!

Its up to you. Just saves spending money on a 'fix' that might or might not work.
All you need is the PC tower,power cable and cable to the TV to test it.
so move the TV closer or PC closer.
you dont really want your OS on an external drive day to day.

David_Aston

Thanks Custardy!

EveryWhere

David_Aston wrote: »

Thank you both. Is the relevance of the hdmi on telly, in order to test if the Adapter would work, in my circumstances Custardy? The tele is nowhere near the computer.
EveryWhere, naturally the free from Dell sounds attractive. Could I load it onto one of my three external drives? Only at USB 2 speeds mind.
I guess I should be able to follow a guide, although as I type this my wife is shaking her head!

The operating system or the data currently on your boot drive?

David_Aston

EveryWhere, I meant load the Windows 7 OS onto an external drive.
Did spend all day yesterday researching around Dell, but couldn't come up with 7, free or otherwise.
It may be that the many megabytes of updates which MS insists that I should download, but which won't download, are compromising everything.
Thank you as always for your comments.

EveryWhere

David_Aston wrote: »

EveryWhere, I meant load the Windows 7 OS onto an external drive.
Did spend all day yesterday researching around Dell, but couldn't come up with 7, free or otherwise.
It may be that the many megabytes of updates which MS insists that I should download, but which won't download, are compromising everything.
Thank you as always for your comments.

That is not how it works. The OS installs to your internal drive.
You need to move all of your photos, documents etc to the external drive as you will wipe everything off the PC drive during a clean installation or just buy a internal HDD for £10 to £15 and swap them.
Ideally you would swap to a solid state drive, But I hesitate to recommend spending the £50 it would cost to purchase such a thing, because of it's current age.
But you have to decide on your path of action before we go through the steps of how to install the new OS.

The best option without spending too much would be to spend £8 on 2 x 2GB PC2-5300 DDR2 667 Desktop RAM taking your total RAM to 4 or 6GB and to effect the clean install of Windows 7.
You'll get a much better than current performance out of that.

David_Aston

Thanks EveryWhere,
Dashing out for baby sitting duties just now.
However, did manage to install Win 7 from a DVD my boy gave me.
It sits on the C drive alongside the previous OS. The files of same show as windows.old and are accessible to view at least.
As today's startup appeared to be not happening, the horrible fear that it was trying to boot up from the previous version formed in my mind. It got going eventually.
Cheers for now.

David_Aston

Just to top and tail my own query, it was definitely the monitor playing up. So, new Acer, Win 7, and I'm rocking!
Thanks again for your help.