I am about to give up on the Toshiba Portege. The hard disk is new; the cooling system is new; but Windows 7 runs slow as mollasses, when it does anything at all. I am going to use the Live Linux CD and see how that works. I am pretty sure something is royally messed up with Windows 7 on it, and there is no solution but buying a new PC. Does anyone make a Linux version similar enough to Windows 7 that I won't have to spends weeks retraining my wife?
I am burning a current Ubuntu Live CD right now to verify that the Toshiba's hardware is okay.
Ubuntu Live CD was a bit slow. Installed alongside Windows 7, it was cadequately fast but I suspect trying to teach my wife to use it might be more work than buying a new Windows 7 notebook. Also downloading Linux Mint to give it a try.
Blogging now from the Toshiba running Ubuntu 14.04. This is really lightning fast compared to Windows 7 running on this same PC. I know that Linux generally works faster than Windows 7 but the Windows 7 as the other OS is obviously deeply injured to be so slow.
Update: I tried to clone the old hard drive onto the new one, but could not figure out how to use the program for doing that correctly. So I took it to Northwind computers to do it. They only charged me $60 to do that, and my time and frustration are worth more than that.
Clayton,
ReplyDeleteYou might try updating the BIOS. There are a number of interactions between the OS, BIOS, HW and even CPU microcode that can get out of sync over years of updates to individual components.
I hope this works for you.
Kevin
Linux Mint is like Ubuntu (it's based off of it) but without the Unity frontend that seems designed by Fisher-Price.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.linuxmint.com/
You know, I have two Toshiba laptops (bought after avoiding Toshiba for years after the propeller technology thing) that are both sluggish. One is an i7 machine with plenty of RAM and it still can't get out of its own way.
ReplyDeleteIf you figure out the problem, let us know!
Richard: I avoided Toshiba for the same reason. But it runs beautifully under Linux, and it ran beautifully under Windows 7 when we first got it. I'm pretty sure that Windows 7 is just misconfigured on it.
ReplyDeleteI know this sounds crazy making, but see if you can do a "update" to Windows10. I have a rather new, low end machine and I get better peformance out of it with Win10 than I did with Linux in many cases (I know, it hurts to type it. I've been a Linux guy for 22 years).
ReplyDeleteClayton, if you think Windows is misconfigured, why not just pave and reinstall?
ReplyDeleteHave you looked at Task Manager or the performance monitors to see if you can figure out where things are slowing down?
Clayton,
ReplyDeleteA couple of suggestions:
Concur with Knitebane on Linuxmint. It's a great OS that is easy for a WinDrone to move over too.
If you want to try a REALLY FAST OS, try LXLE.net. It's VERY LIGHT and VERY FAST
Kevin: Updated BIOS.
ReplyDeleteCurrently upgrading to Windows 10.