Computer geniusus help please

[S2central.net]

Such drives are cheap and plentiful on the likes of Amazon and other shopping sites - you need to know what flavour of USB you have though - should be USB 2.0 even on an oldish laptop but USB 3.0 is faster. They are great for offloading stuff that you don't access often - or for backups. Try and pick one from a reputable name or at least a reputable supplier that has good ratings etc. If using for a backup then its wiser to encrypt it when you set it up... and if you get really nervous you should archive your backups !

Personally I run with external, encrypted thunderbolt drives and a time machine on all of my systems because life is complicated enough for anything else !

[andy10v]

Do all USB drives work with Mac and PC?

[S2central.net]

You have to format drives differently on Mac... well you can run then in a kind of universal / PC format on Mac but there are shortcomings with that method. Its more complicated than it needs to be !

[sidrick]

OP, if I may... I'm the guy that you pay too much to do these things.

The SSD champions mean well, and an SSD is the single greatest upgrade, IMO, that you can do to a PC, however, in your situation I think you will just shift the bottleneck to other areas. If you buy a modern SSD it'll probably have a 6GB/PS interface where-as your motherboard is more than likely SATA 1.0 and able transfer data at 1/4 the speed of the drive.

I see this kind of thing the same as chipping your car. Yeah, you'll get 20-30 BHP more, but you'll get used to it quickly. To get a proper speed increase you need to upgrade the internals. Other than that the comparisons between maintaining/restoring an old car/PC should stop as they're incomparable.

[rynaqui]

I think you should first clear out old programs you don't need and don't use. Background processes will slow your computer down more than anything.

I use CMD>Msconfig to fix the services and processes but you need to know what you're doing and not disable anything OS related.

Just by uninstalling several programs which are not used will do a great deal in speeding up your PC.

Additional ram and a SSD will also make a difference.

[Rikki Kitto]

Many thanks for all the input guys I have managed to speed the old beast up considerable by doing all the things mentioned however the iTunes visualiser is still playing up

I'm thinking that maybe the advice of renewing rather than trying to keep this oldish thing going is probably going to be the way forward so back to an earlier qeustion, which is a good system that is HIFI friendly I listen to most of my music through the computer now via Itunes or Spotify

[MGaz]

I'm no wiz but have experience of the dreaded treacle!!!! A migrant con man did the above for my computer charged me £75 and it was useless after 2 days. Take it to a high street store and for £50 get windows 10 installed it's free and get them to migrate all you personal docs and photos. Job done.

confused*

windows 10 is free if you have windows 7 or 8 already installed. You don't need to pay some gimp in a computer store to do it for you. Just click on the little windows 10 install icon in the bottom right corner of your pc. If you have trouble, download the install tool from microsoft

[MGaz]

P4 processor and 2GB ram - lol - I don't get out of bed for less than a 3GHz quad core i7 and 16GB.

In all seriousness though - an SSD is a great upgrade from mechanical disks.

Problem with an SSD (solid state drive) is that they are expencive for the size you get.

I'm not using one, yet. I'm quite happy with my 1TB HDD . Its fast, cheap and has more than enough storage.

Also, be warned.. an SSD is not to be trusted for long term storage of important files, pictures etc. If you were to remove the SSD from your computer or leave the computer in storage without power for a certain amount of time.. don't be suprised if when you come back to it after a year or two that some of the data is damaged or even lost.

However, I still have normal HDD's in storage that are 7 years old and still work fine.

Just keep that in mind before leaving important media on an SSD unpowered for long periods.

[Vorsprung durch Technik]

confused*

windows 10 is free if you have windows 7 or 8 already installed. You don't need to pay some gimp in a computer store to do it for you. Just click on the little windows 10 install icon in the bottom right corner of your pc. If you have trouble, download the install tool from microsoft

quite simple really,it costs £50 to get them to transfer all your documents and pictures book marks etc etc and whilst your there get them to do the free install of windows 10.

[sidrick]

Problem with an SSD (solid state drive) is that they are expencive for the size you get.

I'm not using one, yet. I'm quite happy with my 1TB HDD . Its fast, cheap and has more than enough storage.

Also, be warned.. an SSD is not to be trusted for long term storage of important files, pictures etc. If you were to remove the SSD from your computer or leave the computer in storage without power for a certain amount of time.. don't be suprised if when you come back to it after a year or two that some of the data is damaged or even lost.

However, I still have normal HDD's in storage that are 7 years old and still work fine.

Just keep that in mind before leaving important media on an SSD unpowered for long periods.

Very good point. The way I run my machines is a small SSD for the OS and core applications (Football Manager, lol, and parts catalogues) and then 2 large mechanical discs in RAID 1.

Nobody should be running just an SSD for their data.

[sidrick]

quite simple really,it costs £50 to get them to transfer all your documents and pictures book marks etc etc and whilst your there get them to do the free install of windows 7.

I think his point is that if you already have Windows 7 or 8 then you simply upgrade to 10, rather than a clean install, so all your data is retained.

[MGaz]

Back on topic tho.. this is the program you want on your PC.

Spybot S&d https://www.safer-networking.org/