Windows messed up

It did sit a long time unused. It has no net connection now. Seems to me the only sane option is to go Mint. So... what are the odds of that not working? cos if it doesn't, I can't go back to windows. All windows are truly rotten, just glad I showed them the door.

It's a single core. Firefox will suck the life out of it, from a CPU cycles perspective. All it takes is one Javascript loop, to bring the machine to its knees.

If the CPU is socketed, you could look for a replacement processor. For example, my single core Acer laptop, there were dual core and quad core replacements. The purpose of using such replacements, is not for "a burst of power". It's not because the thing will run faster. It's just a workaround for Firefox railing on one core, to have two cores or four cores to improve responsiveness.

The SSD helps. But it cannot make a winner from a bad CPU.

Paul

You can get Win10 or Win11 media.

Back in the day, you could get Win7 or Win8 media from DigitalRiver. DigitalRiver is an electronic seller of software, who worked a deal with Microsoft to sell Microsoft products. But once the product run was done, DigitalRiver shut down the server (which was open as far as media was concerned, and that's why we got our downloads there).

If someone can give you a SHA256 for a known Win7 x86 or x64 disc, you could try for a torrent. And check the hash when it arrives. (You can use Imgburn, to convert that hologram DVD to .iso and then run a sha256sum on it.) If you sign up at MyDigitalLife (MDL) forum, they have lists of hashes there, which cannot be accessed now, without being a member.

For updating Windows 7, you can use a USB stick with wsusoffline fileset on it. All the downloads on it, are from the Microsoft server, and the signatures are checked at install time. This avoids a lot of wheel spin, as the updates are applied in a special order, that helps the process work as fast as it possibly can. (The first five or so patches, fix up the Windows Update engine. Necessary so the rest of the patching is done at a better speed.)

There are a few things you can do, to re-paint old equipment. But it's a lot of work, and easier to do for someone with a media collection.

My single core laptop, with 3GB of RAM, has had Win7 and Win10 on it. It works, in the Smithsonian sense. But isn't exactly "powerful".

If nobody has been messing with the laptop, there is a 15GB recovery partition on it! At least for the older OSes, there was a Plan B for you. Only if hobbyists have been fooling with the machine, will the 15GB partition have been erased.

Some recovery partitions, are the devil to get working. The machine setups vary, in how easy they are to kick off a recovery. All personal files are removed, and the machine should give an OOBE response, like it was brand new, after recovery completes.

If the OS was Vista, then you really really do need wsusoffline for that. And the correct release as well.

Since the signing on the Microsoft server changed to SHA2, this might cause problems for a Vista rejuvenation today. But I successfully fixed a Vista years ago. Took me three tries, at two days a piece, until I got enough "traction" to finish. That's how I know wsusoffline is *essential* for that. You would never guess the recipe, without the help of the wsusoffline experts.

Summary: You *can* go back to Windows. But you need friends to do it :-) Lots of friends.

Paul

If the machine is a Dell, the Heidoc tool has a Dell section now.

That Dell section gives access to machine-specific OS images (which activate automatically using SLIC or MSDN). If you lost your Dell recovery partition, you might be able to get the materials. It's not likely the collection is complete (as downgrade rights were for business class laptops).

This tool requires constant attention (similar to Youtube-DL in a sense), and the last update of the tool is 2021.

During the good days of Heidoc, you could have obtained Win7 media with little fuss. Microsoft won't let Dell users download a regular Win7 media. Heidoc solved the problem, by pretending the user was a "retail/system builder" person seeking media. But the more useful options don't work any more. Leaving a bonus only for Dell users. The Dell option is only something created more recently (last year or two).

And that's the nature of download sources... always looking in the rear view mirror.

Sometimes, sites like archive.org have them, inadvertently. You can sometimes find them on Google Drive accounts, until they figure it out (which should be instantly, but isn't always the case).

There are some resources, I won't advertise unless the conditions are right. The walls have ears, and I've lost some good materials in the past because of "over-promotion". For some items, it's just better for a seeker to find them on their own, and vet the materials with MDL hashes.

The MSDN Subscription service used to have a nice table of hashes (and Torrents provide the materials with a matching hash). Microsoft eventually figured this out, and hid all the hashes. The hashes weren't typically strong enough for purpose, so in the longer term scheme of things, it was probably a good idea to hide them. To improve the quality of hash checks. Microsoft didn't go back and re-compute SHA256 for all their subscription materials. That would have taken all of ten minutes work (edit script, push button).

But I'm not bitter about the inability to download stuff.

Paul

Oh yes you can. Windows 10 has a digital licence so you can reinstall with impunity on the same hardware & it will self activate.

W10 Media Creation Tool gives you the options to download & mount the ISO or burn it to a DVD (ISO may be too large) or run from a USB pen drive. -

John Rumm posted the same info further down the thread.

Don't need to. Windows 10 has a digital licence & will authenticate on the same hardware.

Yup, A 'modern' single core machine with less than 2GB sounds like a netbook to me. We have been withheld the model & make, so that's a guess.

The performance of those was not the best, and typically the OS was a cut down install. Microsoft released a 'starter' edition of both XP & 7 for them to push off Linux having any success on that platform.

Ah, reading up it's got 3GB... maybe not then,

This thread has reminded me I'm user not a geek!

A friend left his windows system idle for ever because it was doing this. When I switched it on it took 11 hours to download and virus scan his email from BTs IMAP servers. In that time it was essentially unresponsive.

My linux desktop here - MINT 20 MATE - shows this running thunderbird and firefox (4 tabs) only.

free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 7837 2247 1395 282 4193 5009 Swap: 2047 0 2047

so its about 3 GB plus cache. But with an SSD running out of cache isnt so bad, and with an SSD having stuff in swap isn't so bad. Will wear the disk out faster but it will probably outlast the rest of the machine anyway.,

I did get a 1GB noteboook to run Mint, but it was dire. 2 GB minimum,

This machine loses 3GB when I fire up winXP in a VM, so it needs its 8GB

If MS have a record of the machine being activated for Win 10, then it will let you run win 10 on it - it does not seem to care if the version of win 10 you run was originally installed on that machine.

The OS is also much better at coping with hardware platform changes on the fly.

Yup, download direct from MS here:

If (as it seems from later posts) it has had win 10 running, then going for a complete fresh install is almost trivial. Create flash drive, boot machine, custom install, delete existing partitions, let it get on with it.

If it is as claimed Win10 with so little memory and a modest internet connection then it is quite possible that the thing is working "normally". Even on fibre Win10 major updates are pretty tedious!

It would be worth leaving it connected to the net for 48 hours and see if things improve. It would help to know which tasks were absorbing so much CPU. I have seen race conditions in browsers with stupid scripts do this. There appears to be such a script fault on the BBC news site right now if you use Samsung's default browser on Android and don't log in.

Mickeysoft assumes everyone is on gigabit internet now so if you aren't then you will suffer for it. Win10 is a bandwidth hog in all respects.

Hasn't it complained about Windows being on a different machine? Although you can usually activate it afterwards.

I haven't seen a public announcement but it seems MSFT now allows installation/use of Win 10 with no product key.You can't personalise the looks but I'm sure somebody will come up with an answer to that :-)

What we know is, it's a single core CPU and (maybe) 3GB of RAM.

In a newsgroup environment, the audience can comment on certain aspects of the job, but the OP ultimately does the work. In the best traditions of DIY.

If the OP can find a "friend" who can dig in and make progress, then that would be the better option in this case.

Shops are useless for reconditioning old equipment, because they'll charge a small fortune for an OS reinstall, and they will use their best "factory processing smash and grab" approach to the problem. Pave over the users home directory and so on.

So unless the OP develops inspiration, this is really a job for a friend at the moment.

I have a single core laptop. Equivalent horsepower to an AthlonXP at 2200MHz (it's better than that processor, but the description isn't far off). Has 3GB of SODIMMs installed. Similar in many ways to the OPs situation. I've had W7 on it, W10 on it. I use the laptop to operate a webcam, when examining wiring in crawl spaces or ceilings, that sort of thing. Using the machine for Firefox sessions would be painful. (You could do it, but you would not be enjoying yourself.)

I have a Firefox 52ESR on this machine, which is a little bit lighter on resources than a Firefox 100. It's still not 100% savvy when it comes to websites (some stuff doesn't work right, such as sites that want to "know your location").

At one time, you could make an unqualified statement that "Linux can pave over this". But that's not true today, as newer hardware fares better than old hardware will. DKMS being part of the problem, and kernel ranges for the DKMS that is on offer. The GPU acceleration mania is what makes Linux less friendly now (who wants to run their screen at non-native resolution?). Puppy or Fatdog could be made to work, but then that's not exactly mainstream. (You need mainstream, so that if you ask a question about a setup, someone has a ready answer for you.)

Paul

On 5/14/2022 6:56 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

inxi -G ???

For that is the question.

Sure, it's got *a* CPU and *some* RAM.

For Linux, the graphics support is key.

Installing Mint Mate 20.3 on the laptop. V120 2.2GHz. HD4250 gpu.

Has used 142MB of Swap already, when it is equipped with 3GB of RAM. While it is installing. (After a reboot and installing software updates, its table manners improved and it stopped dipping into swap.)

Install time to Intel 545 SSD = 36 minutes

Boot time - 50 seconds

Now, the performance report (aka suitability)

As installed from media, it used 5.4.0-91 kernel. After software update, kernel version bumped to 5.4.0-110. 5.4 kernels available until April 2025 or so.

driver: ati,radeon <=== presumably accelerated, but... lets check

Bullwinkle@MINTM203:~$ inxi -F System: Host: MINTM203 Kernel: 5.4.0-91-generic x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: MATE 1.26.0 Distro: Linux Mint 20.3 Una Machine: Type: Laptop System: Acer product: Aspire 5251 v: V1.06 serial: <superuser/root required>

Mobo: Acer model: Aspire 5251 v: V1.06 serial: <superuser/root required> BIOS: Acer v: 1.06 date: 06/01/2010 Battery: ID-1: BAT1 charge: 28.6 Wh condition: 46.9/47.5 Wh (99%) CPU: Topology: Single Core model: AMD V120 bits: 64 type: UP L2 cache: 512 KiB Speed: 800 MHz min/max: 800/2200 MHz Core speed (MHz): 1: 800 Graphics: Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] RS880M [Mobility Radeon HD 4225/4250] driver: radeon v: kernel Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 driver: ati,radeon unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa resolution: 1366x768~60Hz OpenGL: renderer: AMD RS880 (DRM 2.50.0 / 5.4.0-91-generic LLVM 12.0.0) v: 3.3 Mesa 21.0.3 Audio: Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] SBx00 Azalia driver: snd_hda_intel Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] RS880 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4200 Series] driver: snd_hda_intel Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.4.0-91-generic Network: Device-1: Broadcom and subsidiaries NetLink BCM57780 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe driver: tg3 IF: enp2s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: 70:5a:b6:fd:80:b9 Device-2: Broadcom and subsidiaries BCM43225 802.11b/g/n driver: wl IF: wlp8s0 state: dormant mac: 78:e4:00:f5:59:39 Drives: Local Storage: total: 476.94 GiB used: 6.90 GiB (1.4%) ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Intel model: SSDSC2KW512G8 size: 476.94 GiB Partition: ID-1: / size: 31.83 GiB used: 6.90 GiB (21.7%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda2 ID-2: swap-1 size: 976.0 MiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sda1 Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 55.4 C mobo: N/A Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A Info: Processes: 163 Uptime: 2m Memory: 2.67 GiB used: 532.8 MiB (19.5%) Shell: bash inxi: 3.0.38

bullwinkle@MINTM203:~$ vblank_mode=0 glxgears ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.

Next, bump the kernel to 5.13 HWE kernel. The driver still seems to be in range. Accelerated performance noted via test.

Bullwinkle@MINTM203:~$ inxi -F System: Host: MINTM203 Kernel: 5.13.0-41-generic x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: MATE 1.26.0 Distro: Linux Mint 20.3 Una Machine: Type: Laptop System: Acer product: Aspire 5251 v: V1.06 serial: <superuser/root required>

Mobo: Acer model: Aspire 5251 v: V1.06 serial: <superuser/root required> BIOS: Acer v: 1.06 date: 06/01/2010 Battery: ID-1: BAT1 charge: 39.4 Wh condition: 46.9/47.5 Wh (99%) CPU: Topology: Single Core model: AMD V120 bits: 64 type: UP L2 cache: 512 KiB Speed: 800 MHz min/max: 800/2200 MHz Core speed (MHz): 1: 800 Graphics: Device-1: AMD RS880M [Mobility Radeon HD 4225/4250] driver: radeon v: kernel Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.13 driver: ati,radeon unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa resolution: 1366x768~60Hz OpenGL: renderer: AMD RS880 (DRM 2.50.0 / 5.13.0-41-generic LLVM 12.0.0) v: 3.3 Mesa 21.2.6 Audio: Device-1: AMD SBx00 Azalia driver: snd_hda_intel Device-2: AMD RS880 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4200 Series] driver: snd_hda_intel Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.13.0-41-generic Network: Device-1: Broadcom and subsidiaries NetLink BCM57780 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe driver: tg3 IF: enp2s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: 70:5a:b6:fd:80:b9 Device-2: Broadcom and subsidiaries BCM43225 802.11b/g/n driver: wl IF: wlp8s0 state: dormant mac: 78:e4:00:f5:59:39 Drives: Local Storage: total: 476.94 GiB used: 8.49 GiB (1.8%) ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Intel model: SSDSC2KW512G8 size: 476.94 GiB Partition: ID-1: / size: 31.83 GiB used: 8.49 GiB (26.7%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda2 ID-2: swap-1 size: 976.0 MiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sda1 Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 56.4 C mobo: N/A Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A Info: Processes: 171 Uptime: 1m Memory: 2.66 GiB used: 523.3 MiB (19.2%) Shell: bash inxi: 3.0.38

bullwinkle@MINTM203:~$ vblank_mode=0 glxgears ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.

Firefox 100 tested, performance acceptable. Didn't even hit on the swap partition, while visiting a graphics-heavy news site .

Conclusion: A pass in this case. Many times when I do this, the results are not as good (Ubuntu).

Paul