Update 5 yr old laptop vs new?

[PinchedNerve]

If you want to save money & your daughter doesn't have high requirements, then adding more Mem, an SSD, along with Win 8.1 will be a very good upgrade, as long as you can find drivers.

Download the 90 day free trial of Win 8.1 Enterprise & you'll know if it will work. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh699156.aspx

 

[Charlie98]

Is five years considered a very impressive lifespan for a computer?

I have heard of people's macbook/ibooks lasting up to 7 years+

Don't know if it is Apple computer's build quality or what.

My original laptop, a 2005 Dell with a Pentium M, is still working... and it took a beating bouncing around in the cab of a big truck for a year and a half. It works... but it's almost unusable... if you see the difference.

I've pretty much retired my laptop... I don't carry it anymore because I have an iPhone. But my daughter's laptop is being used more and more due to her needs.

and you know what cripples all the computers the damn windows automatic updates and since it's enterprise, symantec's antivirus scan also slows it to a crawl.

...you speaketh the Truth. I know from experience... I have all my computers stripped down to MSE, SAS and Spybot... no more McAfee or Norton.

Download the 90 day free trial of Win 8.1 Enterprise & you'll know if it will work.

I may try that... I already swapped my 2x 1GB RAM DDR2 from my old laptop to hers, and I may just install the SSD and W8 separately (while keeping the old XP spinner available...) and see what happens. I don't really have anything to lose except the cost of the OS.

You don't even need an ssd.

Yea, I do... I already have it, anyway, and it's an effort to improve responsiveness with an already hampered slow CPU.

 

[addoraa]

Have not seen it mentioned so far, but what vid card is in the laptop? If it has one of the old nvidia 7000 or 8000 series cards then I would be very hesitant to upgrade the machine since those cards had a very high failure rate. Elsewise 4 gbs of ddr2 667 or ddr2 800, ssd, and Win 7 would be a nice little upgrade. Could drop a TL-68 in but would really not be worth it for the cost vs speed increase .2mhz. Basically the only upgrade cost that is tied to the machine is the RAM and I did see some ddr2 667 4gb kits on newegg for approx 50 bucks . The ssd that was mentioned you already had, and even if the machine went belly up it can be used in another machine or external storage. A copy of Win 7 retail would be transferable to another machine also in the event of failure and it never hurts to have a spare copy of windows laying around. As for a battery unless necessary I would not bother as it sounds like from your description that it stays plugged in the majority of the time.

Just my opinon here, but preference wise I think Win 7 would be a better choice on that machine than Win 8.

I still will not compare to newer model laptops but if it does what is needed for now then the cost maybe worth it until such time that a newer machine would be required. ie college.....

 

[Charlie98]

Have not seen it mentioned so far, but what vid card is in the laptop? If it has one of the old nvidia 7000 or 8000 series cards then I would be very hesitant to upgrade the machine since those cards had a very high failure rate. Elsewise 4 gbs of ddr2 667 or ddr2 800, ssd, and Win 7 would be a nice little upgrade. Could drop a TL-68 in but would really not be worth it for the cost vs speed increase .2mhz.

It has an ATI Xpress 1150 GPU

I actually updated the CPU 2 years ago to the TL-64... it was the best cost vs performance option. It originally had a TL-50, if memory serves... D:

I started to see where I could go with it last night... what a train wreck! Dell does not have W7 drivers listed, only Vista. I went ahead and swapped in the SSD and loaded XP/SP2 on it, only to find it almost unusable. I was not able to browse to MS to update, I couldn't download Opera to try a different browser. Windows Update would not work with IE6, but it wouldn't let me update to IE8. To make matters worse, the wifi card kept dropping out, interrupting any download I was trying to make. Either MS is trying to make it impossible to update XP now, since they are killing it next year, or something is seriously wrong... I've reloaded XP from scratch probably 10 times in the past 3 years and I've never had problems like that.

To make matters worse, I scanned the HDD and CrystalDisk found a pending sector...

Jeepers...

 

[addoraa]

Sounds like you might have a drive going south.

Should be good to go with the ATI card. Personally I would not bother with XP at this time, it has a little bit of life left but it's EOL is rapidly approaching. Win 7 or 8, 8.1really has so many benefits plus future proofing over xp. A tl-64 paired with 4 GB of ram and an SSD should run either well enough and possibly better than XP. It will not be a speed demon by todays standards but it should get the job done satisfactorily. I believe digital river has win 7 ISO downloads still available. As long as a key is not entered during install your good for 30 days and I believe 90 or more by rearming

As for lack of win 7 drivers a substantial number of the Vista drivers work just fine with win 7 so don't be afraid to try them. Many drivers can also be download straight from a device manufacturer if you know the device in question. If you saved the original HDD or a copy of it, it would be easy to tell what devices the machine has by checking device manager. Much easier to find device drivers when one knows what they are looking for.

Might try using ethernet for your connection at first.

Cheers

 

[Charlie98]

As for lack of win 7 drivers a substantial number of the Vista drivers work just fine with win 7 so don't be afraid to try them. Many drivers can also be download straight from a device manufacturer if you know the device in question. If you saved the original HDD or a copy of it, it would be easy to tell what devices the machine has by checking device manager. Much easier to find device drivers when one knows what they are looking for.

I have the original build information available on Dell.com so I'm good there. I wondered if Vista drivers wouldn't work in lieu of actual W7 drivers.

I'm slowly beating SP3 into the computer... I've finally got WinUpdate working with information from another thread. We'll see how it behaves once I get it completely updated. The 2GB of RAM is helping; I saw MC had some either refurb or used DDR2 laptop RAM for cheap, so I may spring for 2x 2GB sticks... although I need to check the system capabilities first.

 

[Matt1970]

I have the original build information available on Dell.com so I'm good there. I wondered if Vista drivers wouldn't work in lieu of actual W7 drivers.

I'm slowly beating SP3 into the computer... I've finally got WinUpdate working with information from another thread. We'll see how it behaves once I get it completely updated. The 2GB of RAM is helping; I saw MC had some either refurb or used DDR2 laptop RAM for cheap, so I may spring for 2x 2GB sticks... although I need to check the system capabilities first.

Dell says the Inspiron 1501 has a 2 GB max.

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/...ducts/inspn/topics/en/landing_inspn_1501?c=us

It would be a waste to go with 4GB with XP anyways.

 

[Charlie98]

Well, the idea was to go to W7...

 

[addoraa]

Dell says the Inspiron 1501 has a 2 GB max.

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/...ducts/inspn/topics/en/landing_inspn_1501?c=us

It would be a waste to go with 4GB with XP anyways.

It will do 4gb no problem, many confirmed cases running 4gb. There are some 8 gb reports also but 4 should be more than enough in this case. Latest or last BIOS should be used also from what I can find.