Evening all

I've got my hands on one of these...

So I've had to dust off my old Sony Laptop as the lead won't work on my Mac, spent the last 2 days slowly but surely updating everything.

The updates stopped last evening, so decided to de-frag it. I started it last night, woke up this morning and it was still going?! Erm, ok then, so left it to complete whilst at work.

Got home to find it's still going!? WTF?!?

I have started the task manager, which indicates it's still doing it's thing, but it should not be taking this long.

I will be the first to admit I am not technical genius, but have done this enough times over the years to know that this isn't normal.

Any ideas?!

It's a 2009 Sony Viao/intel pentium/vista home premium.....

Jay

have you taken off all the old crap and software you no longer use?

Yeah I started by removing everything apple related, then the old movies, music, pictures, vlc player then started to defrag it?!

In all honesty I should probably get a techie to wipe it all and start again?

I suspect I know what the probelm is (you are using Windows built in defragger??)

 

Every time you system writes to its swap file, the defrag is stopped and started again from scratch!!!.

 

Solution

 

1/ Go into the control panel and switch off the pagefile.

 

2/ Reboot into "Safe Mode"

 

3/ Defrag.

 

4/ Re enable pagefile.

 

5/ Reboot into normal system.

 

Alternatively, you could download "Defraggler" from "Piriform"

Edited 28 August, 201411 yr by GentleGiant

Just wipe it and be done with it. It's far quicker and simpler to do that than try and coax an old and cluttered OS back into life.

You'll either have some recovery disks, or there will be a recovery partition on the hard drive that you can use.
I'm sure if you post the model number of the laptop, one of us can find the instructions for you.

My good lady apparently knows where the recovery disc is so think I'll go down that route as all it will be used for here on in is taking to my car

Thanks for the suggestions though guys.

Will close this later once I've sorted it

Go buy a cheap SSD drive too. You'll think you've got a new laptop.

 

My crusty old HP (8yr old) boots in about 10sec with a cheepo SSD.

Good shout, this thing takes literally 10 minutes to properly boot up :p

Are they inexpensive and therefore worth buying given my limited usage?! (Sorry, on the run but will also look myself later)

Small ones are not too bad. I picked one up on special for £25 but it was only 40Gb. I was just trying them out and thought it was worth a punt.

 

Ebuyer has small 30/40Gb drives for about £30. Plenty big enough for an old lappy. WinXP won't work as well with an SSD, it'll slow down a bit over time (technicality of how they work - TRIM function) but will still be faster than a spinning disk.

 

Some tips here that seem to solve most of the issues. Worth looking into since the increased in performance really is startling.

 

http://www.mysolutions.it/tips-migrating-windows-xp-ssd/

Edited 29 August, 201411 yr by Aspman

Small ones are not too bad. I picked one up on special for £25 but it was only 40Gb. I was just trying them out and thought it was worth a punt.

 

Ebuyer has small 30/40Gb drives for about £30. Plenty big enough for an old lappy. WinXP won't work as well with an SSD, it'll slow down a bit over time (technicality of how they work - TRIM function) but will still be faster than a spinning disk.

 

Some tips here that seem to solve most of the issues. Worth looking into since the increased in performance really is startling.

 

http://www.mysolutions.it/tips-migrating-windows-xp-ssd/

I replaced a failed hitachi hard drive on my 11 year old Packard Bell truck of a laptop, with a 60GB ATA (Yes ATA, not SATA)  SSD two years ago. It flies with Windows 7 32 and is still going strong. Only bottleneck now on it is the ATi Radeon 4200 series graphics processor which pulls down the Windows Experience number low - unfortunately this can't be replaced because its embedded in the main board. Its fast with any Office application and Ross-tech VCDS and only slows down with internet and graphics intensive stuff. It boots to the sign-on in about 45 seconds and completes the boot in two minutes.

 

At £60 then it was |certainly cheaper than getting a new laptop in the equivalent modern category i.e. something with a decent I5 or A8 in it.@ £500-£600

 

 

Nick

Edited 29 August, 201411 yr by Clunkclick