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Upgrade from Vista slowed down laptop.


Anonymous76

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Hello everyone

My friend said that you guys are the best when dealing with legacy operating systems. My mom has older laptop that still had old vista on it.

We did clean install of windows 7 but now the laptop feels more sluggish than before. Why could that be? Windows 7 was always snappy on my computers.

Editing: She was using it daily with vista up until now (shopping, web browsing etc..)

intel core 2 duo t5870

2gb ram

500gb hdd 7200rpm

Windows 7 home premium 32 bit

Edited by Anonymous76
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Welcome to MSFN! If you have installed all available Windows updates up to Win7’s January 2020 EOL, then that might be the explanation. Some of Microsoft’s security updates released in 2018-2019 (after Vista’s EOL) negatively impacted system performance. (The same thing would’ve happened to Vista if you had manually installed all the Server 2008 SP2 updates.) You could test that with another clean install of Win7 SP1 with Windows Update disabled to see if it’s less sluggish. Before trying anything that drastic, have you installed an antivirus on Win7? Not many of them support Vista anymore, but they all support Win7 and can make a system sluggish.

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On 4/10/2021 at 2:56 AM, Vistapocalypse said:

Welcome to MSFN! If you have installed all available Windows updates up to Win7’s January 2020 EOL, then that might be the explanation. Some of Microsoft’s security updates released in 2018-2019 (after Vista’s EOL) negatively impacted system performance. (The same thing would’ve happened to Vista if you had manually installed all the Server 2008 SP2 updates.) You could test that with another clean install of Win7 SP1 with Windows Update disabled to see if it’s less sluggish. Before trying anything that drastic, have you installed an antivirus on Win7? Not many of them support Vista anymore, but they all support Win7 and can make a system sluggish.

Hello and thank you for your warm greeting.

We don't have any antivirus installed but we have windows update. I don't know but it is just not possible to even browse the web. It is very laggy and I don't understand why

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5 hours ago, Anonymous76 said:

We don't have any antivirus installed but we have windows update. I don't know but it is just not possible to even browse the web. It is very laggy and I don't understand why

Windows Update has managed to install a large number of updates then? Assuming the internet connection isn’t dreadfully slow, what browsers have you tried? (Perhaps the greatest advantage of Win7 is that it’s still supported by major browsers, even Microsoft Edge, for the time being at least.) Please try running sfc /scannow from an elevated command prompt and let us know the result. If it finds corrupt files that cannot be fixed, that would be another good reason to try another clean install (and disable Windows Update to test for sluggishness before updates are installed).

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15 hours ago, Anonymous76 said:

Hello and thank you for your warm greeting.

We don't have any antivirus installed but we have windows update. I don't know but it is just not possible to even browse the web. It is very laggy and I don't understand why

I might sound dumb, but have you installed the graphics driver, right? :D 

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Hi and welcome , @Anonymous76 !

First of all , Windows 7 is much slower than Vista (no surprise here).

Your CPU is just too slow to handle a million of modern updates with Win 7 . Updates slow down any computer , I'm sure our very experienced user @Gansangriff will agree . What you may try . 

1 - Get back to Vista (obviously).

2 -If you want (need/like) Win-7 that much : Install it without SP1 . Just "Windows 7 RTM Build 7600".

SP1 gives nothing but bloat . There are plenty of users complaining about slowdowns after their installation of SP1. Also , I would suggest to install 32-bit Win-7 on that computer and disable updates (yes , my opininon from a huge experience). You can , of course , install some updates manually , only the ones you really need/want.

3 - Get Windows Vista 64-bit and install Extended Kernel by @win32 . For that you will need this only one update KB4467700-x64 insatalled before the kernel.

If you play DX11 games - you need to install KB2117917 and KB971512. That's it ! You can also install VC redist 2015 and Framework 4.5 .

You do not need anything else, if you don't click suspicious links.

 

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3 hours ago, Dixel said:

Hi and welcome , @Anonymous76 !

First of all , Windows 7 is much slower than Vista (no surprise here).

Your CPU is just too slow to handle a million of modern updates with Win 7 . Updates slow down any computer , I'm sure our very experienced user @Gansangriff will agree . What you may try . 

1 - Get back to Vista (obviously).

2 -If you want (need/like) Win-7 that much : Install it without SP1 . Just "Windows 7 RTM Build 7600".

SP1 gives nothing but bloat . There are plenty of users complaining about slowdowns after their installation of SP1. Also , I would suggest to install 32-bit Win-7 on that computer and disable updates (yes , my opininon from a huge experience). You can , of course , install some updates manually , only the ones you really need/want.

3 - Get Windows Vista 64-bit and install Extended Kernel by @win32 . For that you will need this only one update KB4467700-x64 insatalled before the kernel.

If you play DX11 games - you need to install KB2117917 and KB971512. That's it ! You can also install VC redist 2015 and Framework 4.5 .

You do not need anything else, if you don't click suspicious links.

 

Hi,

Why do you save go back to vista? Why is it obvious? (I don't want to sound rude or anything but this is something very different to opinions on internet)

We need windows 7 on there because internet banking stopped working on windows vista and most websites no longer loaded up correctly.

SP1 is needed for microsoft office 2016 (office 2010 stopped being able to read modern documents that my mom needs to open because of work)

She could click on anything so having an updated windows is important for her.

She does not play any games (I have my gaming tower for that). I could try windows 8 because what I've read here is that it is the fastest modern os idk honestly. Upgrade is now out of question because of shortages.

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4 hours ago, Anonymous76 said:

Hi,

Why do you save go back to vista? Why is it obvious? (I don't want to sound rude or anything but this is something very different to opinions on internet)

We need windows 7 on there because internet banking stopped working on windows vista and most websites no longer loaded up correctly.

SP1 is needed for microsoft office 2016 (office 2010 stopped being able to read modern documents that my mom needs to open because of work)

She could click on anything so having an updated windows is important for her.

She does not play any games (I have my gaming tower for that). I could try windows 8 because what I've read here is that it is the fastest modern os idk honestly. Upgrade is now out of question because of shortages.

Because now Vista has the marvelous Extended Kernel , created by the talented MSFN member @win32 , so all modern browsers do work. If you don't like what I suggested , go and use what you want. Yet another solution would be buying a new laptop for your mother . Core 2 Duo is what , like 15 years old ? I wanted to place this solution as the first one in the previous post , but avoided doing so because I'm polite . Buying a new notebook is exactly the thing I would do in this case , even if I had to sell the parts from one of my rigs. Regards.

EDIT : Took a look at that 800mhz CPU. This kind of hardware is simply out of question for any modern OS . 2GB of RAM is not enough for Win 7 . I remember such processors were too slow even when they just came out , so folks installed win 2000 or XP 32 bit to get some performance out of such laptops. I think you may need an advice from someone else.

Edited by Dixel
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36 minutes ago, Dixel said:

Because now Vista has the marvelous Extended Kernel , created by the talented MSFN member @win32 , so all modern browsers do work. If you don't like what I suggested , go and use what you want. Yet another solution would be buying a new laptop for your mother . Core 2 Duo is what , like 15 years old ? I wanted to place this solution as the first one in the previous post , but avoided doing so because I'm polite . Buying a new notebook is exactly the thing I would do in this case , even if I had to sell the parts from one of my rigs. Regards.

EDIT : Took a look at that 800mhz CPU. This kind of hardware is simply out of question for any modern OS . 2GB of RAM is not enough for Win 7 . I remember such processors were too slow even when they just came out , so folks installed win 2000 or XP 32 bit to get some performance out of such laptops. I think you may need an advice from someone else.

okay it seems like you're not objective cause you are windows 7 hater (I looked on your profile) my core 2 duo t5870 is 2 ghz at base clock! I simply asked why are you recommending vista when we can't use it? (security reasons and office)

I don't have any experience in kernel stuff or programming. so extending something isn't my cup of coffee. I would buy new laptop if they were in stock (I already said that) like paying 800 dollars for pentium laptop is something I simply refuse to do.

We already upgraded the ram to 4gb so it seems to be little better and I'll try to reinstall windows 7 32bit as you suggested and I'll not update it. (even though that will limit my ram to 3 gb and something?)

Please try to not attack me for having older laptop... I mean you could be windows 7 hater but this was inadequate.

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6 hours ago, Anonymous76 said:

would buy new laptop if they were in stock (I already said that) like paying 800 dollars for pentium laptop is something I simply refuse to do.

I don't know where you live and what shortages you're talking about , oh , now I see , you say you live in France . Shortages in France !? Hmm .. Anyway , I can tell you where to buy any laptop starting from 250 Euro , from Western Germany with cheap delivery to any part of the world . A good store since 1999. I do not want to publish the link to the shop here , who knows , maybe it will be considered as an advertisement . But I will , if our dear moderators will agree , we need to help the mother , don't we ? So you may want to ask them.

EDIT : or I can send you a message with the shop's name, if you want .

Edited by Dixel
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If you hate Windows 7, stay out of Windows 7 threads. When a person asks "how can i fix this" we should never answer with "change the OS" unless it is specifically a software related question.

For OP, my recommendation is to get the OS to 4 GB RAM, or if the system supports more than 4 GB RAM physical, get it to above that and use a 64-bit OS. Would like to know what type of operations are being done on the system that make it slow. If you are talking about using websites, then this is a totally different situation. As a daily user of a 32 bit Win 7 (specs are higher than yours but) I can tell you that some websites are just too heavy. For example, Youtube works fine but sites with heavy scripting can lock up or crash the browser. Examples of this are sites that continuously load into RAM such as Facebook, Twitter or say... Yandex image search. In my experience, once a browser's memory usage hits around 800 MB on a system with 3.2 GB RAM (4 GB installed on 32bit OS), things can get very slow or things will stop working. It is this experience that I am even considering of replacing my own Win 7 system.

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In addition to the recommendation to update the RAM, what helped my wife's laptop was to change the HD for an SSD. I was thinking I would have to also do a clean install to really see a difference, but merely cloning her drive to an SSD changed things from being intolerable to being as fast as my desktop system. The laptop is now as much of a joy to use as it was when it was brand new. Absolutely incomparable to the agony it had become. I'm sure a clean install would also help, but currently not necessary.

Cheers and Regards

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Maybe Dixel just had a look at the wrong processor. This one should be yours.
https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_2/Intel-Core%202%20Duo%20Mobile%20T5870%20LF80537GG0412MN.html

It should have enough power to run Windows 7. It's not perfect, but it should run. An SSD would really boost it up however!

First, you have to sort out the drivers for your laptop. Get them all installed and have a look at the devices manager (go to the control panel, then select "system", there should it be somewhere). In that list of all the parts of your laptop, there shouldn't be any questionmarks appearing. Also check, if your graphics card is listed properly there. Things like standard VGA driver don't count (that's not the real driver, it's just a dummy).
Anyways, you could make sure, that there is no internet connection present at the installation process. Just pull the cable. Or just skip the WiFi connection (can be done later). Like that, you can make sure if the Windows updates are the problem (which they can be indeed).

MS Office dependency... well, was LibreOffice an option? Excuse me for bringing up this lame duck, but you might be able to open some documents with it. Others will look terrible however...

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Only to endorse the suggestion by bphlt and Gansangriff, 7 tends to use the hard disk for "background" (mostly unneeded) activities a lot more than previous Operating Systems, a number of services can be disabled to regain some of the lost performance, but the change to a SSD is what usually gives the install a speed boost without the complexity.

About RAM, 2 GB is definitely a bit tight, upgrading to 4 GB  (of which you will probably be able to "see" only 3.2 to 3.5 GB) will also make a difference, and - optionally - you can usually (but it depends on the specific hardware) use Gavotte Ramdisk to use some of the "invisible" memory for - say  - a small swap file or for the browsers temp folder.

jaclaz 

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4 hours ago, Gansangriff said:

Maybe Dixel just had a look at the wrong processor...

Sorry, but no. I said "I took a look at that 800mhz CPU". That's right , read your link again , the CPU has only 800mhz Bus speed . 

800mhz + slow chipset + DDR2 (guessing DDR2 will not even be 400mhz , more likely to be 333Mhz(667)) = slow notebook for win-7. 

@jaclaz is totally right , Windows 7 has lots of unneeded background tasks , a lot more than the others ! So now he will be considered as windows 7 hater too , just for stating the facts ?

In my experience the bare minimum win-7 laptop should have DDR3 and a decent chipset , I guess our experienced members do know about the importance of chipsets and FSB data rate . I still have one laptop with DDR2 and had to install Win 7 on it to test some programme before deciding if I want to port it to Vista . Gosh it was painfully slow . No need for benchamarks , Just launching a browser is like 3x slower.

All I'm saying slow FSB may be enough for older systems , but when it comes to the newer ones , like 7 , it will be much slower , this should come as no surprise. Why SSD may help , because Windows 7 just likes to read/write lots of data , esp. during boots.  

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