What to do with old desktop replacement?

[Dessert Tears]

My sister has a Dell E1705 that is limping along and is nearing 5 years. She has used it as her primary computer the entire time, without cleaning or reloading, and it shows: even though its Core Duo T2250 benchmarks around twice as fast as the C-60, her new netbook is faster for most daily tasks. I had made a standing offer to reload it, and she is finally taking me up on it. I'm trying to decide whether doing a few upgrades would be worthwhile. Considering its age, I'm leaning towards no.

• Operating System: Originally shipped with Vista. I might have a valid Dell OEM XP license to downgrade to, but I'm not sure. Upgrading to Windows 7 with a family 3-pack is a possibility, but I won't use the other licenses immediately.
• Battery: The original battery is shot: the orange light blinks constantly, and it lasts for only a few minutes if unplugged. It's always plugged in, so this isn't a major issue. Is this $36 battery acceptable, or am I asking for a fire?
• Wireless card: 802.11g, which forces our (single-band, if that's the correct term) wireless router and all our other devices down from n. It seems that USB dongles are less expensive than internal cards.
• Hard drive: 100GB is too small for a primary machine, but it might be relegated behind the netbook.
• RAM: I think its current 2x1GB is acceptable. Unofficially, it can be upgraded to 2x2, but only 3.2 GB can be used due to a large reserved address space.

 

[gmaster456]

Keep Vista, get a new battery, a new wireless card (USB is fine), and since most netbooks come with 250gb or bigger drives, just swap the two. I'd also keep the RAM at 2gb unless she really needs more.

 

[Dessert Tears]

Thanks for the input. The E1705 originally had only 1GB, but no major complaints once it was increased to 2GB. The netbook has a 320GB drive, which is plenty, but I would like to keep the Acer recovery partition if possible (assuming it's not too large relative to 100GB). I assume that cloning the drive like [thread=2208612]this thread[/thread] will work, but I need to investigate.

 

[Dessert Tears]

I discovered that the hard drive was dying: it failed one of the SMART tests and the full read/write test. Given the performance issues, I guess that it had problems for a while. I ran the preloaded diagnostics after I ripped out most of the software (specifically full McAfee or Norton, I forget which), and it was still unbearably slow on startup and shutdown.

I was given a used 80GB to use as a replacement.

 

[gmaster456]

Let us know how things go.

 

[unokitty]

Depending on what the machine is used for, you may want to consider the Puppy Live Linux CD.

Puppy is a small (120 MB) distribution that, because it loads itself entirely into RAM, runs very fast. Once booted, you can even remove the Puppy CD.

Very good with browser based applications, loads and runs fast, immune to Windows Viruses. And has the ability to change settings and store changes to hard drive or USB.

Here is a related PC World Article:
For an Old or Slow PC, Try Puppy Linux 5.2

You can download Puppy here:
Puppy

Best of luck,
Uno

 

[Dessert Tears]

Depending on what the machine is used for, you may want to consider the Puppy Live Linux CD.

Thanks for the suggestion. I saw something about using Puppy to boot disk utilities, so I might try that out. I think my sister would object to a non-Windows OS. The notebook is so large – roughly the size of two 11.6" netbooks – that I would pass it along to another family member if she doesn't want it.

The replacement HD seems to have fixed the issues. I installed Vista several times (playing around, figuring out partition sizes) with no complaints. SP1, SP2, and especially the remaining updates took a while. I'm going to add basic utilities, back up an image, and hand it off.

 

[wirednuts]

wtf how is she so lucky to get a harddrive that dies with a ton of warning before hand? (just had two die on me no warning, and lost a ton of good data too)

if thats laptop is in decent shape though, keep it. after you reload it and with a working harddrive, its still a great laptop. the 2gb ram is OK, but if you can get it to 3gb you will notice a difference. dont worry about that extra .25gb of course, it wont matter

 

[Dessert Tears]

I picked up an internal N wireless card for $16 shipped. It's a 3-antenna card with only 2 antennas installed, but signal strength and speed seem fine. Now all of our wireless devices support N.