New laptop

Hi @pete

The first thing to ask is what antivirus measures do you use that allowed you to pick up something nasty, assume that guy would have suggested something better if it had let in something ?

As mentioned adding a new hard drive, though he probably meant one of the more modern and faster Solid State Drives, it may increase the speed of your computer, though its age (?) might mean its speed improvement is held back by the older cpu and motherboard.

To add a new drive (about £25) and transfer your stuff across for £350 - sorry, but thats just a rip off price !

Going back to our eariler post about which make of laptop to get, the younger ones popped in yesterday to show off their new one, as in the link below.
https://www.ebuyer.com/1286252-lenovo-v15-g2-ryzen-5-8gb-256gb-ssd-15-6-fhd-win11-home-82kd008nuk

They also went over to see some of their other friends while in town and left the laptop with us to have a play for a hour.
Have to say it was a nice looking machine with W11 installed, which is not all that different to our W10, though its bit like a smart phones, you can get a bit bamboozeled by all the new things and the pop up, which need to be tamed.

We do use a very old laptop just for online banking but its almost ground to a halt with W10 so after seeing their new one its really made us think !
They said it was £375 when they bought it on Monday, but £399 today; probably putting up the prices so they can lower them again for the Black Fridays sales.

Be interesting to know the make and model of yours to see if its really in need of updating ?
( usually has sticker on the underside of a laptop)

 

I've got Packard Bell model MS2384, that's what it says underneath.

Wouldn't I have to pay for the windows 10.
Its not just a hard drive, he said a complete clean up and get rid of all the dust inside.
OK I know that sounds like small stuff, but it's not something I'm going to do myself.
I did add more memory to my old desktop one but things are a bit more compact in a laptop, not keen on meddling myself.

 

Hi,

If you can go into the Settings page of your Windows menu and see the About page it should show the CPU type, which is probably an AMD A4 5000 processor ?

Seems your machine was sold from 2014 onwards and if its that processor it has a Benchmark figure of 1291, thats twice our old laptop of 635.
By contrast that new laptop above has a figure of 13149, so you can gauge the difference.

We used to run w8.0 then 8.1 and now W10 but never had to pay to upgrade, if its on the same machine then it should be free. Even W11 would be free though our desktop does not have the modern enough hardware to use it, as so many others have found out to their frustration.

Cleaning out the dust is a key job, though if that was a real problem you would probably have been experiencing a lot of thermal shutdowns ?
However, if opening up a laptop its a standard few minutes job to clean out the dust before doing anything else.

As for W11, it was a bit in your face, but you can downgrade it to W10 if you cannot get used to it, and re upgrade for free later, though from our first brief try of W11, take away all the waffle and for our type of use, its really much the same as W10 and W8.1

Spending £350 on your machine vs a new one, done deal or us.

Plenty of similar machines /prices to that Lenovo laptop from big names like Dell HP and Acer who think produced your machine under the PB banner.

As for transfering your data across, much better to reload your orignal program and data, which can be done at your leisure as your old manchine is still working, though again depending on what programs your are running there might be plenty of better new free ones.
About 20 years since we actually bought any new programs.

hth

 

Its looking like better to buy new one.

 

Pete if you pay out that money now on 'rejuvenating' your machine, as Ricky said, how long will it be before the rest of it wears out? I would think of it like a car, it's probably got to the point where it's just not worth repairing any more and ready for scrapping. Going on your laptop's age and agreeing with others here, it would make more sense to put the cash down on a new one. In fact you can buy a good quality machine at around £350 and better still if you can hold on for the sales - which I'm doing.

If you're worried about the change to Windows 11 there's no need. Even for me who doesn't have a good relationship with technology I found W10 fairly easy to get used to. My son assures me, who is using W11, that it's not much different to W10. It's just an update, not a complete change.

I don't have any choice in buying a new laptop. Although it's still functioning, if more slowly now and with gremlins included, the casing is falling apart as I said on an earlier post and it's currently held together with Gorilla tape. No, it's not been abused, like me it's age is showing.

 

When looking for a new PC its often hard to know how good/fast they are as there are many factors involved.
However by using this site you can see how good the CPUs are, the higher the number the faster it is.
Also in todays market, the minium type of cpu should be an Intel i3 or i5 or the AMD Ryzen 3 or 5.

You can check you existing and prospective PCs performace using this site.
PassMark Software - CPU Benchmarks
Just enter the type of CPU including any last digit eg 5500U not just 5500 - see pics below.

Worth looking across a few suppliers sites every few days or using one of those price tracking apps as the prices change so often.

@Sheal have you got a particular model in mind ?

 

I sometimes wonder if I actually need all this faster cpu business etc.

I only use my laptop for internet browsing and storing a few downloads and quite a lot of photos.

Am I wrong in thinking I could get away with a fairly cheap model without all the fast stuff and not notice the difference bearing in mind my usage.
Sorry to be jumping in on this thread but I think I'm still on topic.

 

I find CPU speed is not really here or there for what I do. I spend longer trying to find the right key or correcting my spelling than I ever would waiting on the computer to do a calculation. A fast solid-state hard drive is a far better option (I had to send the external one I purchased back to Amazon as it kept disconnecting itself). It does have an i5-4200U CPU which was relatively fast 8 years ago when I bought the laptop. I would like faster broadband though.

 

The few cheap models with a 15.6 " screen like yours costing under £300 generally have almost the same performance as your old one, so not really a good buy,

However did notice this one from Argos which has a half decent speed and all the mod cons like camera and microphone for online calls etc and windows 10S.
Argos Q&A state that it is W11 upgradable, but like many new laptops it does not come with an ethernet socket for the cable, its wifi connection only to your router; can be a problem for some.
https://www.argos.co.uk/product/9503302?clickSR=slp:term:laptops:15:134:1

The other alternative is to have a SSD fitted to your existing one which according to the manual for the model you mention it does need the whole case opening up. ( no separate hdd compartment cover as some older models have).
If you phone around you local PC shops/repairers to fit a new drive, clean the dust out and copy your data across I would suggest no more than £100 as its only a hour job for a half decent techie.

Out of interest , what is the size of your current hard drive and how full is it ? - eg -
Do you use an external UBS hard drive or DVDs or the Cloud to backup your photos ?

 

Thanks @ricky101, I dont think I would want one that doesn't accept an ethernet cable, I've used that occasionally.
I'm just really trying to find out if speed is something I need if you see what I mean.
I dont have a problem with the speed of the one I have now.

I've got 757Gb free of 916Gb at the moment, so not full, I do use a external hard drive to back up photos occasionally, but I dont wipe them from this hard drive, I find it convenient to have them handy.

Its got 8gb ram.

 

I store my images in RAW format as well as the worked images in JPG. I have almost 2 TB of photographs on my external drive.

 

Yes, likewise apologies to @Sheal if we have hijacked her thread a bit, though it might still be of interest ?

@pete , yes do keep at least two version of your photos, one on your laptop the other on the External drive. If they are pics you have taken yourself, then as @Jocko says, keep a copy of the Raw image as well, if your camera creates them ?
There is a little known problem with .jpegs, that each time you copy them, you loose a litte bit of image quality.

As for the laptops speed, agree for your actual use probably ok , but if you upgrade to W10 you might find , like ours, it runs very slow at times.
The only catch with staying with W 8.1 is that its no longer supported by Microsoft so you could be open to online attacks, even W10 support is coming to an end soon.

Its all part of the constant, new software, needs new hardware, needs new software... cycle !!

Have seen some ytubes on your model seem there is a compartment to easily change the hard drive, does the underside of your laptop look like the pics below ?

Is it worth changing the hard drive to a SSD, it may give a decent speed improvement.

Same with cleaning the fan, that is a techs job, but as said, if it was geting clogged up with dust you would be noticing the fan coming on a lot more often and faster / louder and / or the laptop would be shutting down on it own in the middle of your work, possibly with an overheating message.

So being as you are not a diyer on these things , it might just be worth leaving things as they are ?
What you can do, is like your photos, keep some copies on the external drive of any other data like letters , emails and keep a copy of your passwords somewhere safe , so if anything went wrong you could easily have things tranfered to another machine.

 

It does look like that @ricky101 . It does look like that underneath.
Thanks for all your information and research.
I think I'll probably be buying a new one sometime as most options seem to point that as being the best direction to go.
Which one, I'll probably do my usual approach and just have a wander round PC world one day, get some idea of what is available and see if its cheaper online.

I'm not really keen on spending real money online without seeing what I'm getting.