Trying to breath new life into an old Asus X501U laptop.

I've upgraded it from W8 to W10 (64 bit) and uninstalled all the rubbish that was on it.

It only has 2gb ram and apparently the most it can take is 4gb.

Would it be worth investing in an ssd drive and some ram? Or am I flogging a dead horse?

I've got a couple of Dell D630s which might make better upgrade candidates?

Depends what you want from it. My laptop is that old it came with Vista. I've upped it to 4gig of RAM, chucked a £45 SSD in, upgraded it to a dual boot of Win 7 and Linux Mint and it's a perfectly usable machine, and never really seems slow unless I'm working on huge images. 

 

Processor speeds haven't really moved on in 3+ years, so I'd say a decent brand older laptop is better than a brand new plasticky budget box. 

SSD will make more of a difference.

 

W10 works quite well on low powered kit but more memory will help

SSD will make more of a difference.

 

W10 works quite well on low powered kit but more memory will help

+1. SSD and as much RAM as it'll take will be the best bang for buck for an older lappy.

I dont know the spec for the Asus, or what you want to use it for, but I have an ancient Asus EEPC901 that was chronically underpowered from birth, but is still doing service as a holiday PC/web browser after a RAM and SSD upgrade, and it came with XP!! If your ASUS came with a mechanical drive, then fitting an SSD will make a substantial difference, more so than extra RAM, but adding the RAM will allow some programs to work that currently wont.

Just took it apart. The ram looks like it's soldered on. There are certainly no dims or anything which are changeable.

Just took it apart. The ram looks like it's soldered on. There are certainly no dims or anything which are changeable.

 

If the RAM can be changed, it should be in the manual, if you no longer have it, you can usually download pdf versions from Asus, I msut admit, I havent heard of anything PC-wise with surface mounted, non removable RAM since the days of the Amiga or early Amstrad CPCs.

Use Windows 10's own Ramdisk software and ram boost to give you a few Gigs more  of disk and ram ? USB stick can be used for the purpose.

 

Works on my older 13 year old lptop.
 

 

Nick

Edited 12 September, 20169 yr by Clunkclick

W10 will cope with 2Gb. Not ideal but with the SSD it'll be ok.

I'd pretty much go as far as to say if you can't get 4gig of RAM in it, don't bother doing anything with it unless it's just going to be running office software. My i3 desktop started crawling when the browser was doing anything slightly involved a few months ago, then I realised it still had 2gig of RAM, I stuck another 8 in and it transformed it. It's not using all of it, so I could probably have just stuck 4 in but I felt like spending some money. 

Edited 12 September, 20169 yr by StevesTruck

Use Windows 10's own Ramdisk software and ram boost to give you a few Gigs more  of disk and ram ? USB stick can be used for the purpose.

 

Works on my older 13 year old lptop.

 

 

Nick

What's this? I looked for Ramdisk on the PC and Google and came up with nothing.

 

Also, i thought ramdisks were created as logical hard drives from an excess of ram, not the other way round? Windows already has swap file management?

Edited 12 September, 20169 yr by 2SkodaFamily

What's this? I looked for Ramdisk on the PC and Google and came up with nothing.

 

Also, i thought ramdisks were created as logical hard drives from an excess of ram, not the other way round? Windows already has swap file management?

You're right on Ram disks - me having a senior moment. 

 

What I did on my old laptop was to use ramboost readyboost(Found on a tab on the USB pen disk properties window - may have to be enabled in BIOS) in conjunction with a USB pen drive. Being an Intel single core processor and Chipset to match, it just about handled the demands of data exchange between main board and pen drive as long as it was small Word Files or something like that. Anything bigger, like big bit-dot graphics and it could go a bit  flaky. It solved matters temporarily and that, and  the fact it was increasingly struggling with today's more intense web graphics and environment eventually led me to  get a new laptop. As your machines a bit more recent, it could probably handle Readyboost with ease.

 

Most people have a spare 4 or 8 gig USB knocking about, wouldn't do any harm to try using Readyboost on this before hand.

 

Using a web browser other than Internet Explorer, particularly one with  built-in ad-blocking such as Opera would help the internet experience and save on your data allowance. I'm using Opera on the 2GB W10 tablet that i am using to write this post and the page loading speed difference between it and IE is immense, particularly on this site with all its embedded "Follow you" advertising.

 

Nick.

Edited 12 September, 20169 yr by Clunkclick

If you are fitting a new SSD, a readyboost is a waste of time; the SSD swap file will be MUCH faster than the USB drive, by a factor of about 100.

 

And yeah, RAMDisks were something used in the days of the Amiga to speed up file loading from floppy drives and early MFM HDDS, although on an Amiga, you COULD use all the memory properly, on those early PCs you were pretty much stuck with the first 512KBs.

 

(Amiga A500+ with the1MB VRAM mod (also 50% faster RAM chips soldered to the board), 2MB of additional RAM in the A570 SideKick, and the original 20MB HDD replaced with a BLISTERINGLY fast IBM 200MB HDD I found at work.

I'm not certain, but is there a chromeOS installer... the only thing that chrome does not kill with a half dozen tabs open is my chromebook. It's a good little OS and runs on very low spec hardware.

 

Yup: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/software/how-install-chromeos-on-old-laptop-3636672/

 

Might be an idea, I personally use my chromebook when researching or t ravelling, it can be reset cheaply enough and if lost, c'est la vie

 

SSD or a hybrid will cover the ram shortfall, that and not installing chrome Try vivaldi, I'm finding it very light on it's feet. > https://vivaldi.com/?lang=en

thanks Colin. This laptop would need to run Word. Don't know if Office runs on ChromeOS?

Why Word, Have you tried Libré Office (its free!!).

 

MS Office Suite is a real drag on cpu resources, and even runs unneeded background tasks at start-up.

Edited 13 September, 20169 yr by GentleGiant

Why go to W10 on an older laptop. I'm running a reasonably new CPU (Athlon 2.8) with 2 GB RAM, ON xp/w7 and  W10. My preference is for W7/64bit using 2 GB RAM . It might be better to drop to W7 rather than try to up the memory size.

Office- I've tried office 2003 and Photodraw 2000 on W10 , so it might be worth looking at 2003, as it seems to be less resource hungry. I gave up on Office after 2003, as it seemed to me that MS had tried to re-invent the cycle , with the pedals behind the rider.

Edited 26 September, 20169 yr by VWD

64bit is pointless with 2gb, and w10 copes better with low RAM than 7 or 8

As above really, Win10 runs on one of my old 32 bit laptops with 2GB surprisingly well, even with a crap 5400rpm laptop hard drive in it. Certainly better than it ran 8.1, and possibly better than it ran 7.

I decided to scrap the Asus.

 

On the other hand, an SSD and an increase to 4GB RAM for an old Dell Latitude D630 has done wonders for it. Runs really well, despite being 2008 vintage.

64bit is pointless with 2gb, and w10 copes better with low RAM than 7 or 8

So the PC sales folk say, but I'm happily running W7 /64 never have any problems with speed etc with 2GB.Far better than XP/32 . As for W10-whether or not it's low ram, but it's always notchy, as if it's waiting for free memory

So the PC sales folk say, but I'm happily running W7 /64 never have any problems with speed etc with 2GB.Far better than XP/32 . As for W10-whether or not it's low ram, but it's always notchy, as if it's waiting for free memory

 

I agree, Win7/64 will run quite well with only 2GB of RAM - as long as you dont use too many background programs or memory intensive tasks; for web browsing or basic office tasks it is fine. Just dont try blending......

So the PC sales folk say, but I'm happily running W7 /64 never have any problems with speed etc with 2GB.Far better than XP/32 . As for W10-whether or not it's low ram, but it's always notchy, as if it's waiting for free memory

 

I've put 8GB in my primary laptop, and can see from Task Manager that the actual usage rarely gets above 4GB, whilst the hard drive is constantly at 100% usage in a way it never was with Windows 7. I've put a 500GB SSD for this laptop on my Christmas list! :-)

I've put 8GB in my primary laptop, and can see from Task Manager that the actual usage rarely gets above 4GB, whilst the hard drive is constantly at 100% usage in a way it never was with Windows 7. I've put a 500GB SSD for this laptop on my Christmas list! :-)

 

Not sure how to do it in Win10, but turn off the page file; it may protest, but if you really dont use it, it is a waste of cpu time, as well as dramatically slowing down your machine. (may require a reboot).