Speed increase of older computers

[RichardMS]

Hi Everyone, I just wanted to share recent experience incase it assists anyone else.

I have a 7 year old laptop that was becoming so bogged down by Windows10 that from turn on to a usable state was about 4 minutes.  Also wifi kept failing.

I researched wifi first & found pcbs for wifi are quite generic.  A replacement using a much updated chip cost me about £20. Just swapped it & no driver change required, Eindows handled it. The result speed increase from 25Megs to over 90Meg, Upload gone from 5 Meg to 10. 

Then changed hard drive to a solid state one.  It is like a new computer.  Startup to usable is 15 seconds!!  Programs start in an instant.  The drive must be a massive bottleneck in Windows 10.  The speed increase is far more than can be explained by simply comparing drives.

I hope someone finds this of help

Cheers Richard

[Rick]

Yep, two things most likely to make an old computer slow. It's surprising how long slower WiFi hardware hung around, particularly in laptops (where you'd think keeping up-to-date would be most important)... :/

Making sure they have as much memory as they can handle is another good way to improve performance.

[Carole]

Well done, provided you are confident doing these things.

Carole

[Roy]

For just this reason I have replaced all hard drives with SSDs in both our desktop and laptops. One thing that shouldn't be overlooked with SSDs in respect to laptops is their superior shock resistance compared to hard drives, says he speaking from experience.

Roy