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Help with PC build

B

Brewsir

Junior Member
My wife works from home. She logs into her company vpn using an old laptop.(Lenovo Intel m5 4g ram winxp pro 32bit) Recently, it had major performance issues, I.e., extremely slow/unresponsive. Her job is high stress, very critical to begin with, laptop performance issues nearly sent her over the edge. The company response was to install a new hard drive. I would like to build her a desktop, even though it won't be reimbursed by the company.

I have sitting around an Asus p77v-pro with an Intel i7 processor. My question is, if I were to copy her laptop drive to a new ssd to go in the desktop, would it boot so that I could install the proper drivers for it? If not, is there a procedure to make this work?
 
Gunbuster said:
Great plan, high stress job and you want to do something that could get her written up or fired.
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+1

Before you do anything, she'd need to get an ok from management. I further suggest that she request such permission in writing over a signature so she is covered in the event Joe Blow manager who wasn't consulted has a fit about it down the road.

Once she gets permission, you'd then need to coordinate with her company IT department to determine their specific hardware and/or software requirements for accessing the network.
 
Brewsir said:
...The company response was to install a new hard drive.
Click to expand...

...copy her laptop drive to a new ssd ...
Click to expand...

Yes, but only to this. Copy the hard drive to an SSD, put it in in laptop, and call it a day. You are doing what you have been authorized to do, and making the laptop faster in the process.
 
Steltek said:
+1

Before you do anything, she'd need to get an ok from management. I further suggest that she request such permission in writing over a signature so she is covered in the event Joe Blow manager who wasn't consulted has a fit about it down the road.

Once she gets permission, you'd then need to coordinate with her company IT department to determine their specific hardware and/or software requirements for accessing the network.
Click to expand...

Was in the plan, didn't think it was necassary for my question. Though employees refer to it as the helpless desk. Also, just got a call from her, she's furious, lappy no longer works with her dock, she can't log in, and basically is worse off now.
 
ketchup79 said:
Yes, but only to this. Copy the hard drive to an SSD, put it in in laptop, and call it a day. You are doing what you have been authorized to do, and making the laptop faster in the process.
Click to expand...

A new ssd will work with a semi ancient laptop?
 
Matt1970 said:
If the problem is a fubar XP, a SSD will only help so much.
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True, considering we have no idea what the problem is.

Considering the brief hardware description, that thing should be pretty quick on XP. OP, what have you done so far to alleviate the slowness issue?
 
Brewsir said:
A new ssd will work with a semi ancient laptop?
Click to expand...

I installed an SSD in my daughter's ancient (2007... ) Dell laptop with a slow AMD CPU and it really made a difference... it's actually useable now. The other caveat would be a clean install of XP... even though support for XP is gone in a few months.

That might be a selling point to the company... the security vulnerabilities with non-support of XP soon.
 
This is where, as already mentioned, business needs and costs come in. A new notebook from the company seems like what's needed, to me. Try to get one with an SSD, if possible, sure, but hers needs to be retired as a Windows business computer. It may be just fine for continued use as a home Linux computer, if you own it. If it's the company's,they need to just be replacing it with a new 7 or 8 Pro one (if XP is needed for anything, still, what about 7 and XP mode?).

This is just the sort of crap that causes companies to replace PCs at shorter intervals than you may at home, because the time and effort trying to fix problems begins quickly approaching the costs of putting a brand new PC in her hands.

Or to put it another way, if they can't fix it, and she has to telecommute, she shouldn't be the one stressing about it, because her employer is the one failing at dealing with their problem.
 
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Brewsir said:
Was in the plan, didn't think it was necassary for my question. Though employees refer to it as the helpless desk. Also, just got a call from her, she's furious, lappy no longer works with her dock, she can't log in, and basically is worse off now.
Click to expand...

"Helpless desk" - have to remember that. We call ours 800-DIAL-AN-IDIOT.

If you decide to get an SSD, look around for one with TRIM support under XP. Last I saw, Intel, Samsung, and Corsair provided utilities which supported TRIM under XP (I think Corsair just added theirs for XP/XP-64 last year which was curious given XP was so close to EOL).
 
How has her company's IT department not switched out XP for Vista at least? Support ends in 2014..
 
32-bit XP can't even see the 4GB memory. But anyway, one method to test whether a faster replacement can be brought online with a minimum of fuss is to clone the laptop drive to a spare HDD, then place the clone into the laptop and run sysprep /generalize so that the OS will re-detect the hardware in the new installation. Thus prepared, the cloned drive can be installed into the proposed replacement system, and functionality and performance can be verified before committing to the change.
 
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