Ropey Laptop...
Discussion
I have what would have been a fairly decently spec'd Asus laptop when I bought it around 7 years ago, I guess it's perhaps getting old but I don't really have the cash to spare for a new one right now. It was working fine until I decided to put an account on it (Windows 10) for my son to use. As he's eight I ticked all the boxes to make sure he couldn't screw it up too badly and applied the new account.
It might be unrelated but from then on this machine really hasn't been the same. First up after setting up his account it seemed to lock down every other account on the machine (mine and the wife's) and despite mine being the admin one it wouldn't even let me look at files in the C:\ partition that the OS is on, flat refused to connect to an Android tablet for file transfer that had been no bother before, and other various odd goings on. Managed to sort most of it through Googling but it's still really not right. Logged in as me it would regularly blue screen. After a bit of diagnosis I attributed this to a hard drive error, fixed with CHKDSK, but whatever it does to fix it seems somewhat temporary.
Also on powering it up it can take ages before it becomes usable, yesterday I managed to get into task manager whilst it was on a go slow and it largely seemed to be a number of processes maxing out the hard drive and it took a good 10 minutes before this subsided from 100%, the processor and memory load during this activity didn't seem too bad perhaps getting up to 25% CPU usage so the HDD seems to be the bottle neck.
Now I'm not averse to doing a fresh install of Windows, done it many times on other machines, and the obvious thing to do (to me anyway) is to install an SSD into this machine at the same time as it currently runs a mechanical drive. My concern is that there's actually something more fundamentally wrong with the machine e.g. dodgy memory or CPU that's could be causing the hard drive issues and blue screens and I'd just be wasting my money buying the drive. What's the most sensible way to test all this stuff to make sure the PC is generally healthy before shelling out? I downloaded a boot image (Hiren) to run from USB that has some diagnostic stuff on it.
Biggest lesson I have learnt is to never use Microsoft accounts again under Windows 10, hadn't really realised it was optional anyway, but much better to be able to administer these things myself with legacy style user accounts rather than let M$ do it (and screw it up).
Thoughts from the PH PC gurus?
Thanks.
It might be unrelated but from then on this machine really hasn't been the same. First up after setting up his account it seemed to lock down every other account on the machine (mine and the wife's) and despite mine being the admin one it wouldn't even let me look at files in the C:\ partition that the OS is on, flat refused to connect to an Android tablet for file transfer that had been no bother before, and other various odd goings on. Managed to sort most of it through Googling but it's still really not right. Logged in as me it would regularly blue screen. After a bit of diagnosis I attributed this to a hard drive error, fixed with CHKDSK, but whatever it does to fix it seems somewhat temporary.
Also on powering it up it can take ages before it becomes usable, yesterday I managed to get into task manager whilst it was on a go slow and it largely seemed to be a number of processes maxing out the hard drive and it took a good 10 minutes before this subsided from 100%, the processor and memory load during this activity didn't seem too bad perhaps getting up to 25% CPU usage so the HDD seems to be the bottle neck.
Now I'm not averse to doing a fresh install of Windows, done it many times on other machines, and the obvious thing to do (to me anyway) is to install an SSD into this machine at the same time as it currently runs a mechanical drive. My concern is that there's actually something more fundamentally wrong with the machine e.g. dodgy memory or CPU that's could be causing the hard drive issues and blue screens and I'd just be wasting my money buying the drive. What's the most sensible way to test all this stuff to make sure the PC is generally healthy before shelling out? I downloaded a boot image (Hiren) to run from USB that has some diagnostic stuff on it.
Biggest lesson I have learnt is to never use Microsoft accounts again under Windows 10, hadn't really realised it was optional anyway, but much better to be able to administer these things myself with legacy style user accounts rather than let M$ do it (and screw it up).
Thoughts from the PH PC gurus?
Thanks.
SSD upgrade is a no-brainer providing it has a good amount of RAM. W10 in 4GB isn't the best and really the minimum should be 8GB.
I am running a 6 year old Lenovo that was massively improved by a wipe and reinstall - it had the SSD fitted but only 4GB of RAM.
I have only ever used local accounts but thanks for the warnings about letting M$ properly cock things up for you
I am running a 6 year old Lenovo that was massively improved by a wipe and reinstall - it had the SSD fitted but only 4GB of RAM.
I have only ever used local accounts but thanks for the warnings about letting M$ properly cock things up for you
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