Windows 7 support ends?

cherry76

It is time to look for a new desktop due to the above. I do not want to upgrade it as it is 6 yrs old and very slow. I usually buy dell, pl can anybody recommend a decent one for home use, light user general browsing, internet banking and watching Netflix. Does not have to be high specs. Thanks

debitcardmayhem

cherry76 wrote: »

It is time to look for a new desktop due to the above. I do not want to upgrade it as it is 6 yrs old and very slow. I usually buy dell, pl can anybody recommend a decent one for home use, light user general browsing, internet banking and watching Netflix. Does not have to be high specs. Thanks

Which dell have you got , tell us the service tag, a new SSD and memory may save you a lot of un-necessary expense. But if you decide new or maybe refurbished, what is your budget, is your monitor still serviceable ?

A.Penny.Saved

The problem with a 6 year old PC is that the manufacturers of the motherboard and chipset stop support and do not provide drivers for newer operating systems. That PC might support windows 8.1 but most likely will not support windows 10.

I am in a similar position. I like windows 7 and still use it but support is soon to end and my motherboard has very limited support for windows 10. BTW I tried windows 10 and hated it.

EveryWhere

A.Penny.Saved wrote: »

The problem with a 6 year old PC is that the manufacturers of the motherboard and chipset stop support and do not provide drivers for newer operating systems. That PC might support windows 8.1 but most likely will not support windows 10.

I am in a similar position. I like windows 7 and still use it but support is soon to end and my motherboard has very limited support for windows 10. BTW I tried windows 10 and hated it.

Your statement is wholly inaccurate.

I haven't found even a single PC that is incompatible with Windows 10. Don't assume that because the PC builder doesn't supply Drivers for Windows 10, that there are no Drivers available. in most cases, Windows 10 itself will supply them.

Your assertion that a six year old PC may be incompatible is completely wide of the mark.
Even my ten year old DELL has Windows 10 Professional 64 bit installed, with no issues at all.

EveryWhere

cherry76 wrote: »

It is time to look for a new desktop due to the above. I do not want to upgrade it as it is 6 yrs old and very slow. I usually buy dell, pl can anybody recommend a decent one for home use, light user general browsing, internet banking and watching Netflix. Does not have to be high specs. Thanks

A six year old PC is almost new. The problem is not the age, but the specification when purchased.
In addition to this, six years ago, you would be hard pushed to find a consumer PC sold with a solid state drive as standard. They would mainly be the old technology electro-magnetic storage drive.that tends to slow down with use over time(for various reasons.)

Even new PCs these days are sold with old technology electro-magnetic storage drives, as the storage capacity looks impressive to the uninitiated. But one should not buy a PC fitted solely with such a drive, unless you are capable of fitting a solid state drive for yourself. They are old and slow.


The problem has nothing to do with age, but with the old and slow hard drive and the build up of unwanted software issues.
All of this can be solved with swapping the old and slow drive, for a fast solid state drive, costing as little as £17 and a clean install of the operating system.
Storage drives are usually user replaceable.
But you need to tell us the make and model number of the PC and to not be stubborn, for us to be able to help.

forgotmyname

I was running Windows 10 (sometimes several at the same time) in a virtual machine on a dual core Athlon XP4200. (Windows 7 boot)

It was laggy but it did the job, plenty of RAM helped a bit. But CPU heavy tasks did bog it down.

Install Windows 10 on an SSD using the Windows 7 serial number?

EveryWhere

forgotmyname wrote: »

I was running Windows 10 (sometimes several at the same time) in a virtual machine on a dual core Athlon XP4200. (Windows 7 boot)

It was laggy but it did the job, plenty of RAM helped a bit. But CPU heavy tasks did bog it down.

Install Windows 10 on an SSD using the Windows 7 serial number?

I would utilise the gatherosstate method.

The product key method might only work for retail versions of Windows 7.

onomatopoeia99

EveryWhere wrote: »

They would mainly be the old technology electro-magnetic storage drive.that tends to slow down with use over time(for various reasons.)

My electro-mechanical storage drive is over 10 years old and still running at the same speed, both in terms of rotational velocity and data throughput onto the bus.

How might it slow down with use?

EveryWhere

onomatopoeia99 wrote: »

My electro-mechanical storage drive is over 10 years old and still running at the same speed, both in terms of rotational velocity and data throughput onto the bus.

How might it slow down with use?

Rather than waste my time, writing you an essay;

There are two “times” that matter for a hard disk: the first is transfer time, which is how long it takes the disk to read data. This is partially dependent on how fast the disk spins. However, simply making the disk spin faster may not help: ideally, you want the disk to spin exactly fast enough that the electronics of the hard drive can read each sector and process the checksum to make sure it was read correctly as the sectors pass under the read/write head.

The second is seek time, which is how long it takes the drive’s read/write head to get to a requested sector after receiving the request. Hypothetically, you can make this faster by making the read/write head move faster. However, in practice, there are limits to how much this helps: first, because the head swings along a particular path, so once the head has gotten to the right track (circle of sectors on the drive), the drive has to wait for the proper sector to come under the head. How long this takes on average depends on fast the disk spins. Second, if you make the head move faster, then it will vibrate more when it stops… and you have to wait for that vibration to stop in order to get an accurate read or write.

For most modern hard drives, seek time is much, much longer than transfer time, unless you’re reading a very large amount of data. Thus, seek time is by far the most important part in determining how long a hard drive takes to access data.

Now, as a hard drive fills up, three things happen:

First, the data spreads out over the drive. Modern operating systems try to cluster data together, but as the data fills up the available capacity, that becomes less and less possible. Thus, the average distance the read/write head is having to move slowly increases over time, slowing down transfers.

Second, data becomes fragmented. As files are written and deleted over time, large files may no longer fit in a single available contiguous block of free space. Thus, the file is divided into two or more pieces. If these pieces aren’t in the same track, then reading the entire file takes multiple seeks. (Even if they are, the drive has to “skip” reading some blocks, which still slows things down, just not as much.)

Third, drives aren’t perfect, and eventually, some sectors will start to go bad. The drive notices that the read was wrong by noticing that the sector’s checksum doesn’t match the data that was read. So, it tries to read the sector again. That means it has to wait for the sector to pass under the read/write head again. The drive has a limit on how many times it will retry: if it can’t successfully read it after that many times, it will return an error.

However, if it does manage to successfully read the sector, something else happens. Modern hard drives are built with additional spare sectors, and will remap sectors: so, it will take the data it just successfully read, write it to one of the spare sectors, and make an entry in a table it keeps internally, saying, “this sector is bad; here’s where the replacement is”.

Now, though, any time you read that file, an extra seek will be required, as the drive has to swing the read/write head over to where the spare sectors are.

So, part of it is just the nature of a physical drive: data is spread out, and building a drive with a separate read/write head for each track would make it way too expensive. The second part is slow mechanical failure.

Regularly defragmenting your drive can help. In particular, if you’re using a FAT filesystem, those perform very poorly with fragmentation, and you should upgrade to NTFS or another more modern filesystem. The Unix Fast File System and variants of it tend to handle fragmentation well, but even those can be improved by defragmentation in bad cases.

So, if your hard drive is starting to get slow, defragment. If that doesn’t seem to help, you may wish to download a tool to check the SMART data. SMART is a standard hard drive manufacturers use to keep information about the status of a hard drive that can be used to determine if it’s close to failing. If it is, you may wish to replace the hard drive.

Modern versions of Windows automatically do defragmentation in the background, and use NTFS by default instead of FAT. Thus, they shouldn’t slow down from fragmentation as much as older versions.

An SSD is a giant memory block, so there’s no physical “head” that has to move. This makes seek time much faster, and means that they don’t slow down significantly because of fragmentation or data spreading out to take up more of the drive.

Maybe your drive is different

wongataa

EveryWhere wrote: »

Rather than waste my time, writing you an essay;

Basically if you don't keep your drive too full everything will be fine and you won't suffer slowdowns. Windows 7 upwards (and maybe Vista) defragments hard disks in the background for you so you don't have to worry about doing that.

EveryWhere

wongataa wrote: »

Basically if you don't keep your drive too full everything will be fine and you won't suffer slowdowns. Windows 7 upwards (and maybe Vista) defragments hard disks in the background for you so you don't have to worry about doing that.

One can do their best to mitigate these things. But my replies are for the OP. They assume that because the device is six years old, that it is now obsolete.

So, in as simple a way as possible, I suggested that fitting a much more efficient solid state drive would solve all of her current issues and allow it to run faster than it did when first purchased.

Little point in bogging a novice down with complicated explanations. SSD and clean install will obviate the need to waste money on a new PC, in turn creating more landfill from a perfectly good PC.