Dying laptop?

EveryWhere

Si_Clist wrote: »

Sorry, I should have said. It's a Toshiba Satellite C850/1D2.

It's actually eight years old. SSD is likely the answer. My mum has a similar laptop and it's fine with an SSD.

Changing the drive is super simple;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6Crk2igp5A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6Crk2igp5A

as is installing the OS to it.

If you are skint, £18 will do it; https://www.7dayshop.com/products/patriot-memory-burst-ssd-solid-state-drive-2-5-sata-iii-internal-120gb-pbu120gs25ssdr

You can shave £1 off if you are really skint; https://www.mymemory.co.uk/integral-120gb-p-series-5-sata-iii-2-5-internal-ssd-drive-560mb-s.html

Though you can get 240 GB for £8 more; https://www.7dayshop.com/products/patriot-memory-burst-ssd-solid-state-drive-2-5-sata-iii-internal-240gb-pbu240gs25ssdr
https://www.7dayshop.com/products/crucial-bx500-3d-nand-sata-iii-2-5-240gb-internal-ssd-solid-state-drive-240gb-version-ct240bx500ssd1

Si_Clist

Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed. I do believe that's me sorted - now I know exactly what's involved and the likely cost, it's now up to my Lady Wife to decide what she wants to do.

I didn't want to complicate matters by saying in my OP that apart from the lethargy issue, the battery's also stuffed to the extent that we just run the thing off the charger. We tried a couple of new batteries off Ebay but to no avail, so she might well decide to put up with the pathetic performance until the thing does the decent thing and dies ...

SuperPikachu

I have no idea how good Kingston are, but Base.com emailed me the other day about their SSDs - Really good prices, might be worth a punt;



https://www.base.com/buy/product/kingston-a400-240-gb-2-5-internal-solid-state-drive-sata-500-mb-s-maximum-read-transfer-rate-350-mb-s-maximum-write-transfer-rat/dgc-sa400s37_240g.htm


The 120GB is £18

EveryWhere

SuperPikachu wrote: »

I have no idea how good Kingston are, but Base.com emailed me the other day about their SSDs - Really good prices, might be worth a punt;



https://www.base.com/buy/product/kingston-a400-240-gb-2-5-internal-solid-state-drive-sata-500-mb-s-maximum-read-transfer-rate-350-mb-s-maximum-write-transfer-rat/dgc-sa400s37_240g.htm


The 120GB is £18

Stay away from that particular model, unless they have fixed the firmware. I wouldn't bother frankly.

Google "Kingston a400 freezing"

mksysb

poppellerant wrote: »

Is Linux only good for internet browsing and emails? Surely the OP wants to use their machine without feeling limited.

Of course not, you can do anything on Linux that you can do on Windows but not necessarily using the same programs, however as the OP specifically mentioned Firefox and Thunderbird, both these will be exactly the same programs on Linux, so no learning curve and he'll be up and running straight away.

poppellerant

EveryWhere wrote: »

Stay away from that particular model, unless they have fixed the firmware. I wouldn't bother frankly.

Google "Kingston a400 freezing"

I installed that same drive in a machine about a year ago and never had any issues of freezing - perhaps it had the newer firmware. You are right though, plenty of people online are commenting that the drive freezes. It seems that in mid/late December 2018, Kingston released a fix for this issue. I will check the firmware of the drive I installed later and see if it even needs updating.

I do regard Kingston as a low/mid range SSD and wouldn't personally use one due to my computer usage. I have always trusted Samsung SSD drives and they have never let me down.

poppellerant

mksysb wrote: »

Of course not, you can do anything on Linux that you can do on Windows but not necessarily using the same programs, however as the OP specifically mentioned Firefox and Thunderbird, both these will be exactly the same programs on Linux, so no learning curve and he'll be up and running straight away.

Quite. But what you said in your post implied that Linux was only good for those two things:

mksysb wrote: »

If you don't want to spend any money and all you do is web browsing and mail, then you could try one of the light linux distros, mint, xubuntu or manjaro for example. It'll make your current machine usable again.