Revived wife's laptop with windows 8 and ssd

D

david_

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Jan 30, 2012
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She has an old Toshiba core 2 duo that started with vista, which I upgraded to xp last year. Tonight I bought a windows 8 upgrade for $39 and put my old 60gb ssd in and I'm REALLY impressed with the speed, even in ide mode.

The laptop boots faster than my pc and feels almost as quick. It was fantastic how 8 did all the driver installs with no bloat. I'll buy a new battery and hopefully get another year out of it.

Just happy to have a technology win for once! :)
 
david_ said:
She has an old Toshiba core 2 duo that started with vista, which I upgraded to xp last year.
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Sounds like a downgrade to me. XP Pro was far less stable than Vista 64bit for me. BSODs, files system files getting corrupted, slow, unresponsive, compatibility issues with old software and had all sorts of issues like locking HDDs in PIO mode are some things from the top of my head. We've come a long way since the XP days. Though Win 8 seems like a good upgrade from Vista save for the ugly UI. Glad your PC is quick.
 
having had to deal with 2 hp vista laptops, both with athlon 64 x2 cpus that were loaded with 32bit vista, i can attest that doing anything on them was slow and annoying (+hp software slowing things down).
Even the one with 4gb of ram wasn't faster.

Put w8 on it, and no hassle. w8 hdd optimize makes a great difference compared to vista's defrag method
Also i ve had power dips that caused the laptop to shut down (i don t leave the batery in it) and w8 booted right away sometimes with the programs i had open. While vista would ve done a 45 min integrity scan.

in the consumer preview it recommended some driver updates that would crash and reboot is probably the only thing that's gone wrong

all in all w8 does everything w7 does except the start menu , which is the thing when it launches :rolleyes:.
I suggest ppl start using the windows key and see how it can speed up launching programs compared to w7 start menu / programs file /program name/ find exec. lol
 
maboblivion said:
having had to deal with 2 hp vista laptops, both with athlon 64 x2 cpus that were loaded with 32bit vista, i can attest that doing anything on them was slow and annoying (+hp software slowing things down).
Even the one with 4gb of ram wasn't faster.
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Yup, hers was the exact same. ANYTHING took forever, even running barebones. It was early in the Vista life cycle though, so I'm sure it improved later on, we just never switched back.

She was definately getting tired of XP though and W8 works great for her/laptops in general IMO.
 
Same thing here. I had my daughter's old HP laptop and a shelf and decided to use it as a platform to test W8. I was just going to use it to test it 'cuz the thing was slow and clunky. Threw in a Vertex-1 60GB from my junk drawer and loaded W8. It was quick and snappy and (almost) nice to use.

Now I find myself reaching for this laptop almost daily...
 
Glad to hear more old machines are getting new life. I'll be interested to see if it's just clean OS installation or if it stays snappy as she download a bunch of shi.. I mean, uses it.
 
I just did SSD and OS (Win7 and Ubuntu 12.10) on 2 core2 duo lappys. Our experience mirrors yours. For general laptop use (email, web, netflix, etc.) these machines perform just fine with SSD, sufficient RAM and a modern OS.
 
I have windows 8 loaded on every machine I own, I use it in conjunction with startisback and I really like it. It's very fast and I find that some of the tools built in work better and are more detailed than w7.
 
walwalka said:
I have windows 8 loaded on every machine I own, I use it in conjunction with startisback and I really like it. It's very fast and I find that some of the tools built in work better and are more detailed than w7.
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I like it too, but I wish the Desktop view had the windows 7 start menu. It's a pain to go back to Metro and search for the app.
 
You should look at the many start menu replacements for W8, maybe you'll like them better.
 
david_ said:
I like it too, but I wish the Desktop view had the windows 7 start menu. It's a pain to go back to Metro and search for the app.
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setup the start menu with only the programs u want so u dont search for them everytime... all apps ,find program, right click pin to start menu or desktop . Then never mess with it unless u add new programs. Then 1 press windows key 1 click mouse button every time.
 
Flogger23m said:
Sounds like a downgrade to me. XP Pro was far less stable than Vista 64bit for me. BSODs, files system files getting corrupted, slow, unresponsive, compatibility issues with old software and had all sorts of issues like locking HDDs in PIO mode are some things from the top of my head. We've come a long way since the XP days. Though Win 8 seems like a good upgrade from Vista save for the ugly UI. Glad your PC is quick.
Click to expand...

Huh I'd like to get what you're smoking but I'm sure it wouldn't pass through the customs! :D
 
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