Toshiba Laptop Upgrade - Which to try first?

[JoLin]

I have a 3 1/2 year old Toshiba Satellite running Win 8.1, with 500 gig hard drive and 6 gigs of ram. It's about perfect for my use with a nice big screen. I don't do graphics or gaming and the hard drive is less than 1/4 full. I maintain it by running disk cleanup often and making sure the hard drive is defragged.

It seems to be running slower than it used to, and I assume that the software I run (which gets upgraded on a regular basis) is demanding resources that are stretching the hardware to the limit.

Rather than buy a new laptop, I'm thinking about increasing Ram (it'll take up to 16 gig) and/or installing a SSD drive in place of the current one. Question is, which to do first? I'd like to try the upgrades one at a time, starting with the one that'll give me an immediate improvement. Back before the new drives came along, a ram increase would always give you a pretty good 'pop' in performance, so I'm leaning toward doing that first.

Your thoughts?

 

[dingbat]

Same problem with my wife's laptop.

I got digging into it and found almost 30 gigs of left over Window's update files alone. If you're updating additional software, that number could easily double. 1/4 disk or not, 100+ gigs is a lot of data to search thru.

Do yourself a favor. Go to windows task manager. Open system utilization/ performance/ resource monitor and run thru the tabs. It will tell you where the bottleneck is.

It turn out the your running background programs or services you're not aware of

 

[bruceb58]

Download Process Explorer. It's basically Task manager on steroids. Look for any processes that you don't recognize. You could even do a screen capture and post it here.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx

One thing that many people suggest is just doing a clean install every few years. Do a good backup and reinstall your whole operating system from scratch. After I do a clean install, I save an image so that its easy to do later. I use Acronis.

6Gb of RAM is plenty of RAM. That should not be your bottleneck.

The amount of Windows update files on your drive does not affect how slow your computer is.

 

[southkogs]

I would agree with Bruce - I typically do a reinstall every year or three on my working boxes and that seems to pick 'em up quite a bit. For what it sounds like you do, 6GB of RAM should be plenty. Watch memory usage from things like malware guards and anti-virus software. Some of them can really chew up resources.

If I had to pick between the two: I would upgrade to an SSD first. That makes a substantial difference in operating speeds IMHO.

 

[bruceb58]

Also...makes sure you aren't running two or more anti virus programs at the same time. You will of course be able to see that in the Process Explorer.

 

[JoLin]

You guys are a bunch of spoilsports, but.... I went through and uninstalled some unused programs; and expanded the disk cleanup to include the system files (which raked in all those old win update files). It cleared out nearly 2 gig worth of 'stuff'. I hadn't used that option in quite awhile, so thanks for making me do a little investigation.

It's booting/running noticeably faster. As for reloading everything from scratch, the pc didn't come with reinstall cd's, so not exactly sure how to go about it. I've been using pc's since my first Commodore (VIC-20) and had more than one of those 'reconfigure from scratch' attempts go pretty badly. Think I'll leave well enough alone for now.

Thanks for the help, guys.

 

[Brandon5778]

Hi JoLin.. I am a computer security major and I know a few things, here are my thoughts. You seem to be decently computer literate, given your post on how you defrag your PC and all. The first thing I suggest doing if you want to put any money into it is upgrading your operating system from windows 8 to windows 10. Windows 10 has a lot of things going for it compared to what you have. It is also built to run on systems with a low amount of resources. 6 gigs is a lot of RAM. I think that is more than enough, no reason to pour money into more RAM. And although it would be great, a sizable SSD would cost a pretty penny. Windows used to let you update your OS to 10 for free, unfortunately I don't think they still do, but it isn't very expensive to buy.

I have an 8 year old laptop with a 250gb hardrive, 2gbs of RAM, and I believe it had the Intel celeron processor. It originally had windows 7 and had become obsolete due to slow boot times and slow performance, even after I had cleaned it all out. I put windows 10 on that laptop and it came back to life, ran like it was new again. Just my experience..

Looking through the other posts you guys summed it up pretty well on what to do. The program Bruce posted is a great tool and you should periodically check to see what is using resources. By the way, what processor is in that laptop? Good luck!

 

[bruceb58]

As for reloading everything from scratch, the pc didn't come with reinstall cd's, so not exactly sure how to go about it.

Contact Toshiba and they will send you a file to allow a reinstall of the OS and all the drivers. I did that with my Toshiba laptop when I lost my harddrive. You actually may already have a restore partition on your harddrive right now. See if there is an extra drive letter. That would be the restore partition.

I agree with what Brandon said and move up to 10.

a 500GB SSD is pretty cheap these days. Well worth the extra money in my opinion. I have one in my desktop and my laptop.

 

[JoLin]

I'll ponder all this stuff.

Have resisted moving to Win 10 because I hate the user interface. My PC originally came with 7 (hated it), I upgraded to 8.1 (hated it), then added Classic Shell just to get back to an interface (XP-like) that I was comfortable with. Damn, I miss MS-DOS 2.11

My current HD does have a restore partition. I'll do a little research about how to access it, but right now the PC is running a lot better so I'll probably hold off. The idea of potentially having to reinstall all my ancillary programs is daunting.

Lastly, I don't need any more HD space than I have, and a 500 gig SSD can be had for $150. or less, so I'm keeping that option open. I like this Toshiba. After years of buying laptops and having them fail after a couple years, this is the most solid unit I've owned since the old 'tower' days. The only issues I've had occurred when I picked up a virus, and a quick restore to an earlier backup has fixed it every time.

Brandon, the processor is a Pentium 2020M / 2.4 ghz

My .02

 

[tpenfield]

In terms of prioritizing, the SSD would be the better thing to do first, as your RAM is probably OK at 6 GB. However, while you got the case open on the thing, you might as well do both

 

[dingbat]

Have resisted moving to Win 10 because I hate the user interface.

Bought a new Optiplex all in one for Christmas. Love the computer but can't stand Windows 10.

The fact that it doesn't interface directly to my email provider (Verizon) doesn't help it's case.

I much prefer the Windows 7 Pro on my laptop. I have no interest in going back to DOS and the blinking green bars of DB2 on the IBM.

Worst yet, sending a drawing to our office in the U.K. by modem. Start the process before you went home in the evening and hope it went through over night

 

[Boomyal]

a 500GB SSD is pretty cheap these days. Well worth the extra money in my opinion. I have one in my desktop and my laptop.

I have started a new thread titled SSD harddrive. I have some questions.

 

[ezmobee]

There is no more effectual upgrade than going to an SSD drive.

 

[MTboatguy]

If it came with 8.1 on it, then you have a partition on your HD called Recovery, or Install, something to that affect that will have a clean file, that you can use to re-install windows. You can write to it and pretty much nothing can kill that partition.

 

[bruceb58]

You can write to it and pretty much nothing can kill that partition.

Unless you do something stupid and format the entire drive including the restore partition.

 

[MTboatguy]

Unless you do something stupid and format the entire drive including the restore partition.

Yes Bruce, that is one thing that will screw things up!

 

[JoLin]

The reformat option is in 'settings', so the process itself (using the restore partition on the HD) is easy enough to kick off. I need to wait until I'm in the mood to spend the hours and hours it'll take to reinstall all the Windows updates since 2013, reinstall and configure Classic Shell; find, download and reinstall all the software I use, delete the MS Office trial package (I use Apache Open Office), install Firefox and get rid of I.E., recustomize all the software to default to the way I like it, etc., etc., etc.

While the process of reinstalling the original OS is technically easy, the amount of work I need to do to get the computer back to the way I have it now, isn't. If a $150.00 SSD upgrade will buy me a few more years without doing all that, then it becomes a viable option.

My .02

 

[HT32BSX115]

I need to wait until I'm in the mood to spend the hours and hours it'll take to reinstall all the Windows updates since 2013,

When I did my HP, it took all day and all night on a cable internet connection to go through all the updates and reboots.

And by the way, You might try switching to Libre Office. It seems to be more modern and better supported over the old (now Apache) Open Office https://www.libreoffice.org/

Cheers,

Rick