Hi, a friend of mine gave me his netbook to look at , claiming it was incredibly slow. It has had little or no use for a while. I recovered the netbook to factory settings, using the recovery partition. It made absolutely no difference. I realise with only 1gb ram and running windows 7, it was never going to be fast, but that's how it was built, and it was much faster when new ( about 3 years ago ) To say it is slow, is an understatement, opening my computer took 1 minute, running the browser is painful, running more than one thing at the same time brings the machine to a halt, it stops responding, logging off takes about 3 minutes. So, is it a hardware problem ? There is a copy of the recovery partition on a usb, is it worth trying a recovery using that. Thanks in advance
Highly doubt its a hardware issue. I had a few of those and they were abysmal from the get go. Windows 7 bare minimum RAM requirement is 1Gb of RAM. Thats just for the OS. Once you add in using additional applications you are over that 1Gb requirement. The processor in that netbook is probably also painfully slow sitting somewhere around 1.2-1.4Ghz. Its probably a very low end Intel Celeron or Atom CPU, which are about as slow as it gets. The best it will get is running some sort of very light weight Linux distribution. Even Ubuntu in its current state with Unity will cripple that PC.
Other specs? I had one running Puppy Linux pretty well, but in the end found it useless (even for something that was free). If you need Windows, XP would be a better choice. Or you can try something like NTLite... (once again, XP would be better at that).
I have an Asus eeePC Netbook that is multi-booting... DOS WinXP Win7 Win8 Win10 Ubuntu It runs fine but has 2 GB RAM.
The Atom processors used in netbooks are slow, which is always going to hinder performance. However, the biggest issues is only have 1GB of RAM, which is simply not enough for Windows 7. Even Windows 7 systems with 2GB of RAM struggle, once Windows Update starts using hundreds of megabytes of RAM when checking for updates. You will need to upgrade the RAM to 3GB if you can. Or, alternatively, you could switch to a light Linux distribution designed for low end systems. I have little experience with Linux, so can't offer an suggestions. But there are other here who I'm sure can offer suggestions, or even do a Google search. It's worth noting that when Asus first introduced their netbooks they came with Linux and not Windows installed.
Mick, I'm not concerned with 1 GB of RAM. I've run Win 7 satisfactorily with half a GB of RAM. When new, the Netbook ran much faster than it did now. And it had 1 GB of RAM. I'd image the Entire Drive just in case you want to go back to the current system. Then delete all partitions and install a fresh Win7. You could try installing one of the Win10 ISOs if a Win7 boot disk isn't to hand. A fresh Windows install will tell you if you previously had a software issue.
You could install Debian x86 server (with no desktop) and then install XFCE: $ su # apt-get update # apt-get install xfce4 To get minimal XFCE: $ su # apt-get update # apt-get install --no-install-recommends xfce4 And then install other packages as desired. See https://packages.debian.org/jessie/xfce4
Many thanks for all the replies, much appreciated. Like I said the machine is not mine ( thank goodness ) . If it was I would gladly follow your recomendations. Actually on the machine was a program called Express gate cloud, a tiny linux partition , extremely limited, with a chrome browser, but very little else, and no option to install anything. It actually booted into this very quickly and the browser speed was acceptable. So he always has the choice to use that. As for the 1gb of ram , I used the scanner from crucial, and it said the ram was soldered to the motherboard and not upgradable. Once again thanks for your expertise, and suggestions.