The Best Upgrades for Old Computers? - Comments Page 2

I have a Toshiba laptop 10 or 11 years old with a 17 inch screen. When I was elected treasurer of our hospital auxiliary and installed Quickbooks on it, it slowed right down. Quickbooks is a resource hog. I installed a 1TB SSD and 8Gb of RAM and it's now more than fast enough, even running Quickbooks. It came with Win 7 and now has Win 10.

Linux! My old XP and Vista machines do everything I need, free. I run Mint.

Very good points worth to consider because older computers are more designed to last than new ones.
However,, as to my knowledge its more difficult to upgrade a laptop.
Probably Bob can show us options to do so.
Thank yopu

The machine I'm using right now is a dual core Dell Latitude D520 laptop that began life with Vista Ultimate. It really struggled even after upgrading to 4GB of RAM and a 7200 rpm hard drive, often taking 10 to 15 minutes just to boot. It couldn't even play YouTube videos. Consequently, it sat unused on a shelf in the closet for more than two years! One day, when faced with potentially buying a new laptop for the family, I had the wild idea to upgrade the OS. It's amazing how well this old laptop runs under Win 10 Pro! I couldn't believe it was the same machine. I have attached a 2nd large monitor and use this setup daily for all sorts of things. I have 24 tabs open right now in Chrome with only 7% CPU and 69% memory use.

One upgrade - GUARANTEED to speed up the start process - is moving your OS to an SSD. You can add a small SSD drive, or swap out the magnetic hard drive. It will speed up most of your regular programs as well.

Now you will boot and compute as fast as --- most Chromebooks, which only have SSD drives. That is their real performance secret.

If you want a computer, that does more than surf the net or stream video, the SSD upgrade is great.

I claim to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. That said, a few years back I tried Win8 and went back to 7. 8.1, on the other hand, seemed to be more useable and only got better. I am now running 10 on my machines and would not go back, even though some antique software either works poorly or not at all. Also, my experience with alternative OS's has been that if the old PC has trouble with newer Windows it will generally not work all that much better with Linux, etc. The developers take advantage of newer hardware, just like Microsoft does. An SSD definitely is a speed improvement, especially to boot-up.

Just a hint:

When buying Ram, make sure it's the right amount of pins and make sure the motherboard is not maxed out (depending how old the pc is)

Hello Bob,
Finally one of my favorite subjects. I love to upgrade old Laptops and PC's. SSD's and more RAM usually do the trick. I actually have a Dell Latitude D610 running Windows 10 Home 32bit, that was a real challenge, new processor, more Ram and a 7200rpm 100GB IDE HDD. PC's are easy because you can always slap in a Graphics Card along w/RAM and SSD. I have "OLD" Laptops that I will put up against newer models, they all boot in under 15 sec. Lenovo T420 i5,8GB Ram and 256 SSD, Dell XPS M1330 Dual Core T7500 w/128MB Graphics, 4GB RAM and 256 SSD and my Dell Latitude D630 Dual Core 4GB RAM and 256 SSD. Believe me when I say they don't make them like this anymore.

This is being written on a desktop made in 2002, so yes, old computers can be kept functioning usefully. Regarding hardware, RAM on this device has been expanded to the maximum (a heady 2GB), and two new larger hard drives have been installed, one for the OS, the other for data.
Choosing the right browser is very important with old computers. An old browser will give patchy and insecure web access, while a new browser may be too heavy or not support the OS.
In general, I have obtained the best results with Pale Moon, a stripped down fork from Firefox. This no longer supports XP, but there is a variant, MyPal, which adapts new issues of PM for XP users.
A good ad-blocker is also essential for browsing the web with an old computer, as modern web-sites are frequently very complex and access many other domains, including social media, while loading. This can mean that the site will load very slowly or not at all on an under-powered machine. I use uBlock to restrict this activity and enable sites to load more quickly.
Web browsing can also easily grind to a halt, particularly on old machines, when too many tabs are open. My solution for this is to use another add-on (LullMyTabs) to unload (not close) tabs which are not in use after an interval, which can be set to, say, 8 minutes. Tabs which need to kept open can be excepted.
It is well-known that there are ways of still getting security updates for XP.
The anti-virus program on a machine of this kind must also be light and compatible with the OS. My choice, Panda Dome (formerly Panda Cloud) still supports XP, is free, and refers signatures to "the cloud", so it does not need to burden the computer with this processing or a stream of definition updates.
When modified and used in this way, a Pentium 4 can still do useful work. It is interesting to note that processor speeds have not increased substantially since this class, so this is not an issue, although naturally only having a single processor will be a limitation for many users.

I see my comment about upgrades has been associated with another ""James"" about a Win 10 backdoor. that's not me.
These articles from BOB contain many, many opinions which provide information to be able to make an informed decision. I can only comment on what I do and how I do it. I love all the info that's provided by BOB's readers.