It was Win10, but as described below - I have resolved it now, via accessing safe mode. I'm not sure its a legitimate copy of Win10 though, because it says 'activation required' in the bottom right hand corner.
Not all that bothered, but it still has a peculiar issue..
If set to hibernate, instead of sleep - it seems to go through the hibernation process when the power button is pressed, but when coming out of hibernation the screen remains black. It flashes up a photo, then black again. It never gets to the login screen. Sleep, shut down and reboot all work fine.
Does the laptop have a windows serial sticker anywhere on it? (typically only found on Win 7 or earlier). If it does, then you may find you can go into the ten activation wizard, and elect to enter a new key. Use the one on the sticker and it will likely activate.
However not being activated is less of an issue on Win10 - it will still get updates, and continue to work without ever locking you out or insisting on activation. However you won't be able to use some of the aesthetic customisation options.
Might be worth checking if there is a BIOS update for it - some older machines can have odd screen related issues like this with Win 10. I had similar on an old (but high end when new) Dell Inspiron recently. Converted it to 10 from 7, and it worked fine up until it found a new display driver to match the hardware. After that, it just gave a blank screen on the internal LCD after booting (but was still fully functional on an external monitor or via remote control). A BIOS update sorted that.
I have found that mechanically sound lappies with >2GB of ram and a decent 64 bit processors become far too useful to bin once SSDed (and in my case [linux] Minted.
In my experience a ssd makes very little difference to the speed of windows, however in the past I've probably already optismed Windows for performance rather than looks.
Some real time activities of virus checkers can really slow down a machine especially those for the Norton/Mcafee stables which i now regard as just as bad as a virus itself.
The perceived speed of a computer is a function of many things and disk access is one of the slowest bottlenecks there is. SSD wont make CPU any faster, but it sure speeds up loading code and virtual memory from disk.
Which windows? And how do you define "speed of windows"?
I ask since its totally at odds with my experience in most cases - at least for machines that are not crippled by lack of CPU power, or say running the Win 7 Aero interface on stuff without the GPU oomph required.
I have found that anything typically Core2Duo/Win 7 or later will get a substantial boost in speed on an SSD connected via a 6GB/sec SATA interface. Applications that would take 20 secs to start from a HDD, will usually load in 1 to 2 secs. Boots from cold to responsive that used to take 5 mins down to 30 secs etc.
By way of example, I had a customer's 6 year old i3 box "on the shelf", and they needed a hack gash machine for occasional office use. So I said I would "refresh" it to be useable. I booted the thing and it took
*forever* to get started. Just uninstalling 4 or 5 unwanted bits of software, and doing a disk clean up took over an hour. I then cloned it onto a s/h SSD, and swapped the drives to then started an upgrade to 10 and do the rest of the setup. From the point it had the SSD in it, it was like using a totally different machine. By the end it was quite useable even for someone like me who detests slow machines.
There have been times where most AV programs have had a significant impact, although in recent times the system load seems to have deceased quite substantially for most of them.
Depends a bit on what timescale you are talking about...
With older machines of the Core2duo era, the experience is frequently pretty poor these days even if working at peak performance, simply because the world of software has moved on. OS and Applications sizes (and hence load times) and memory usage have increased vastly in the last ten years or more. So disk performance has a big impact on perceived speed of the machine, and old HDDs are going to suffer a disproportionate hit. If because of the larger memory footprint you also start paging sooner, you get a further big hit in performance. In more recent times much software has gone 64 bit, and that again makes for larger application sizes and in many cases memory use as well.
Increasing the RAM, and changing to a SSD can help greatly, but will not necessarily fix all ills since CPU grunt is required for some things that modern software expects to be able to do.
Modern usage is far more dependant on internet access speed - so poor performance there will have a much bigger impact on system usability than in the past.
Web content is also orders of magnitude larger than in the past - so the memory and processing requirements for handling web pages has increased in many cases to anything from 10x to 1000x what they were.
All that assumes the machine is running just what you want. Even modern spec machines will slow if loaded with enough malware.
Not malware exactly more demoware when you buy them these days. The first thing any new user should do is strip it back to the core stuff, then install what they want.
It is, however very wasteful, modern ways of creating software, with huge runtimes, loads of graphics and lots of redundant routines in from different programming environments that folk use to make their software. Its no wonder that much of it is only partly accessible. Brian
Use msconfig to prevent apps starting up at boot time. It's an insane practice to run all apps all the time. A SSD rather than HDD can make a huge difference - just keep the hdd for user data. Restart firefox etc frequently, it's a huge ram hog.
I see dual core processor laptops that are very fast when new, deteriorate to a snails pace in just loading up. The malware runs under Windows which is not yet loaded, yet the laptops still runs slow on bootup.
How do you get rid of malware? There are all sorts of companies saying they can transform a laptop by just buying their product. There is one that has Linux on a USB bypassing the problematic Windows operating system, that seems to work.
Most people want browsing, email and the odd word processing, I suppose Linux is good enough and gives a performing computer with malware which is targeted at Windows users. Does Linux have Word compatible word processors?
I've had a pentium 75 running win95 that ran at satisfactory speed, as long as only 2 or 3 apps were running. I forget what RAM it had, but not much. Plus various stuff from the P2 era that was fine. It's all down to software. If you need to, get rid of all crapware & replace apps with lighter versions. If the OS itself is too fat, go for a lighter one. There's no lack of choice.
Asking whether linux can do word processing is the sort of question I'd expect to hear decades ago.
On occasion, I've seen *10,000* registry accesses per second. They repeat at 1 second intervals, some of these things. Even when the registry is cached in RAM, this can't be good.
These have *nothing* to do with what you see on the screen. Think of this as a "tax" you pay for modernity.
You don't really know how "busy" these newer OSes are, until you look under the hood.
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Let's look at the B50-30
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Processor Intel Celeron N2815 $107 tray price Bay Trail 2 Core (no hyperthreading), 1.86GHz Likely thermally limited. If no fan is present, will throttle.
Memory: 2048 MB (up to DDR3L 1066, OK)
"55.86%: Such a bad rating is rare. There exist hardly any notebooks, which are rated worse." <=== notebookcheck rating
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Cache = 1MB ("I'm not dead yet"...) # Only an issue when running 7ZIP compression # Doesn't say what the L1 uses, which could be an issue Max # of Memory Channels 2 # Means the memory bus is not gimped! # This is important for snappy graphics # (like if you unplug a DIMM)
Processor Graphics = "Intel HD Graphics for Intel Atom Processor Z3700 Series" This is a 4 E.U. GPU as the built-in graphics.
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Scroll down the list here for Execution Units, and see just how low this is.
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8,10,12,24 The above is pretty low, but only needs to be able to composite graphics windows into system memory (as the GPU has no memory of its own). Only games would be horribly gimped.
What of Bay Trail. Well, you're in luck, as it's the first generation of Atom to get "out-of-order (OoO) execution". The Atom processors before this generation, were in-order execution, which means in effect that the max number of instructions retired per clock would be a lot lower. In-order execution means the instructions are serialized, with more stalls.
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In-order execution was selected for the other ones, in the belief that this would reduce power consumption. Which it probably did.
In the text here, you can see that Atom wasn't "pure" in-order. It dabbled a bit in OoO. But only a bit.
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The concern is, does the next one claimed to be OoO also cheat ? That's the $107 question.
You could run a bench on this device and find out. Let's just look some up. Single threaded operation is used for a lot of everyday tasks, so we'll use that. Now, I have a 2C 2T (no hyperthreading processor) too, that I'm typing this on, so we can compare to that for fun.
Even though my CPU is 50% faster on clock, it's pretty close to 3X faster. That means the IPC is about 2X better.
And more modern processors with the same clock range, would be that much better again on IPC improvements (because they'd include Hyperthreading for 30% more, plus be able to retire more instructions per clock and have fewer bottlenecks). Hyperthreading varies from -5% to +30% or so, and in some cases, it can actually be better to turn it off in the BIOS. Especially if the OS process scheduler is "defective" in some way.
I would need to downclock my E8400 quite a bit, to pull neck and neck with the N2815. So low in fact, I might even be below the recommended spec for Windows 10.
I have a single core laptop, running Windows 10, and it's no wonder pony either. The Passmark on that one is
AMD V120 2.2Ghz (no turbo, single core) Passmark CPUMark = 665 1C 1T
and it's still 50% better. Mine is a single core, which means the N2815 is ahead of it (some I/O can run on one core, while a calc runs on the other core, for example).
I put an SSD drive in the laptop, and well, that's a joke. It boots faster, but after that, it's a wash. The chipset is only SATA II.
You could disable Windows Defender and get some of the performance back. But is it worth doing that ? You decide. Windows maintenance functions will not run on all cores, and the maintenance is limited to using fewer cores so something is left for the user. There is Windows Defender and there is Search Indexer, wasting performance that could be used reading the newspaper.
My laptop is also not running 1909 at the moment, and is using an older version of Windows 10. You can also rip Windows Update out of it, as an option. What fun. There's a lot of fun to be had. Between TrustedInstaller and wuauserv, they waste a lot of cycles during updates. Even checking for updates wastes cycles.
Which is better, an unpatched, exploit-riddled older OS that runs at a decent speed, or a bloated over-patched modern OS ? Good question. How lucky do you feel ? For best results, Windows 7 is recommended, just so there is a choice amongst web browsers. And there's DXVA2 so the movie decoder works. (This assumes the 4 E.U. graphics *has* accelerated movie decoding.)
I'm surprised they charge $107 for that processor. Of course, they charge $350 for some laptop processors, and we pay a rather large premium for such things.
Often computer speed is reduced if you have more than one real time virus/malware checker running at the same time. For instance the win10 inbuilt checker may be running as well as Mcafee/Norton installed as a package by the computer manufacturer/retailer.
With two programs now checking the disk in real time every time a file is downloaded and/or written the processing of other data is likely to get slower the more files you have, which may be orders of magnitude more than when you purchased the machine.
The two checkers may be effectively fighting each other trying to gain access to the same data at the same time.
Disable one of the virus checkers and.or just run it occasionally manually.
Many programs that are installed on Windows seem to want to be started on boot-up when there is no real need to do so. They may want to phone home every time the computer is booted to inform you that there ois an update. Removing such requests from start-up may/will speed up the boot time. On the same subject the disabling of automatic checks for updates and an automatic install may also speed up a machine.
Does linux have a compatible Word processor: Libra Office (previously Open Office) for Windows, Linux and Mac. Cheaper than Microsoft Office in that it can be downloaded and used for free,
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