Windows Update - long time to check for updates

Yeah, all the disk i/o might have been a lot related to p2p updating. I did at one time install and use O&O's Shutup10, and after tweaking things, it did quiet down and act a lot more like Win 7. Otherwise, it does run pretty well on my machine. For what it's worth department...

 

Kerodo,

I noticed similar in my wife's laptop and there were slowdowns when there was high disk activity. She was complaining. I had a spare SSD so I swapped the HD for the SSD and restored an image. Amazing. No more high disk activity and I'm popular again. Just an observation.

 

Yes, I have thought of putting an SSD in this machine, it would be absolutely fantastic! Now all I have to do is get myself to actually DO it...

 

In Australia the price of Intel 535 SSDs has dropped dramatically lately. $52 US for a 120 GB SSD. Some friends and I bought half a dozen and upgraded our laptops. The old HD was then installed in a caddy in the optical bay. I never use optical discs so it's no loss.

 

Yeah, price is not a problem, just making time to open the laptop up and try to install an ssd. I don't usually delve much into the hardware. It might be educational..

 

It's not complicated procedure. When you buy SSD, check to see if the USB adapter is included. If not you can get it off of eBay or Amazon dirt cheap. USB adapter is only required if you want to clone your laptop existing drive. Which is possible through the SSD included software.

If you upgrading from Windows 7 machine. It probably supports UEFI - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows-8/what-uefi

However, simply upgrading from Windows 7 installation to Windows 10 won't change over from BIOS to UEFI. You would need to boot the Windows 10 disc via UEFI bootup.

If you upgrading from Windows 8 machine, you already using UEFI.

If you don't know if your computer will support UEFI, you can use utility like HWiNFO to retrieve this information.


P.S: If you upgrade, you'll still have the hidden partitions like the old recovery unless you've removed them previously.

 

Thanks Phant0m, I will have to check into this. I know it would make an incredible difference. This laptop is an Asus, about 6 years old that came with Win7, only a 2.2 Ghz core 2 duo with 4 gb memory. The ssd would probably really make it fly compared to now...

 

The entire procedure took less than 20 minutes.

I already had an entire drive image. Remove HD, install SSD, restore image.

 

For Win, I have Macrium images of 7 and 10. Will Macrium restore an image off a 500GB drive onto a larger drive? I would hope so(?)

 

I'll post what I've e-mailed to others. The details like pricing may not be accurate now. I mentioned Samsung SSD, as an example only.

I'm going to quote Samsung SSD description...

“Upgrading your PC with a Samsung SSD is the most economical way to breathe new life into an aging PC. The 850 EVO reads, writes and multi-tasks at incredible speeds, enhancing boot-up speed, application loading and multi-tasking performance. It's more than an upgrade, it's a complete transformation of your PC.”

Basically, the reads and writes and multi-tasks are superior to the traditional hard drives. Here's an example of reading power. When you boot-up your computer, from having shutdown completely. The Windows loading screen that keeps us waiting for minute – two minutes before getting us closer to our desktop screen. With SSD it would feel that this Windows loading screen no longer takes place, because it processes so fast that it doesn't last even long enough to be-able to show this screen up now. 10 seconds and you are already on the desktop and already able to run programs. Traditional hard drives you had to wait to see the desktop screen, THEN minute or so just to have responsive system to your requests, .. like to launch a program.

Running CPU intensive programs like Adobe Photoshop and other graphic editing software like GIMP. Anti-AV Security suites and big office programs will significantly be improved with regards to launching performance.

With regards to gaming performance, and FPS improvements. No question about it, the loading of the games is significantly faster. The loading/waiting screens 0% - 100%, you'll observe very impressive reduction in load times. Is game FPS better? It really depends on the game designs.

Mouse be more responsive to your hand movements when looking around in big maps or making those lightning fast shots at 180 degrees in Quake Live.. this one person's experience that I was reading. He continues to say “maps faster in open worlds too, particularly in Planetside 2, things load faster with 500 people in front of me fighting compared to my 2TB HDD.”

From reading around the Internet, seems to be sound. If a game loads the next scene while playing the current scene you would see in-game boost in frame rates. Multi-playing, when streaming is involved, you'll see big improvement. See http://www.pcgamer.com/how-do-ssds-affect-gaming-performance/ .. be sure to read the user comments section.


I like the Samsung SSD hard drives, use to be pretty costly, these drives. Prices continues to be more and more affordable. When I've just visited Amazon, I've noticed you save on Samsung 850 EVO 250GB.. significantly. You'd save $96.24CAD, if bought currently. If you wanted 500GB, you can currently save $76.83CAD.

These Samsung drives fits into laptops, however they also work the same in a desktop computer with just a simple cheap bracket to convert from 2.5" to 3.5". They carry very impressive five-year manufacture warranty. SSD hard drives, because of its technology, the data storage life of an SSD can outlive me!

SSD hard drives has much lower power consumption.

SSD vs HDD - http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hdd (Interesting comparison)

 

Wow, that sounds too good to be true, but I know it is. I'm almost ready to jump in my car and go buy one...

Thanks for the info.

 

I haven't used Macrium or alike. However at a glance, it's said to do so. "Generally it can restore to a larger size" - http://support.macrium.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3286

 

Kerodo,

I think you mean restore to a smaller drive. I don't use Macrium much but I think the answer is "probably". You might have to resize your partitions prior to creating the image but I'd ask the question in the Macrium thread.

Can you post a screenshot of your current Disk Management? Please include the top section with Capacity and Free Space.

 

The real problem is that I keep switching back and forth using various linux distros and both Win 10 and Win 7, but it looks like I will probably keep Win 7 now since I've figured out how to deal with a few things that were bothering me in 7. I have a 500gb HD, with just the 100MB partition, the rest is all drive C: (almost 500gb). I don't do any fancy partitioning or put my data and other things in separate partitions.

Can I get a 1 TB SSD? Or is that not possible? I was assuming that I could buy a larger SSD than the HD I have now.

I'm not sure how to do screen shots, but the above is basically what I have.

 

How much Free Space is in your C: drive?

 

Ok, just checked, I've got 415GB free out of 465GB. Lots of space free...

 

Larger the SSD more pricey It gets. However searching for SSD on Amazon.
Samsung 850 EVO 1TB for $430. 500GB $206.69 CAD.

 

So that's 50 GB used. If it was me a 120 GB SSD is what I'd buy. Anything bigger is a waste of money because you could have both drives in your computer if you desire.

 

Thought it was for his laptop? If so, not all laptops support multiple drives.

 

Ok, thanks guys to both of you. I get the idea now. Since I don't really use or need tons of space ordinarily (just OS and maybe 25GB data), then it would probably make sense to just get at most a 500GB SSD, or even smaller as mentioned. I have no idea if I could use both drives at once. But I'm pretty sure I'd be so spoiled by the SSD, that I'd not even want to use the old drive anymore...

I'll do some more research and ponder it all for a while. At this point, it wouldn't even be out of the question to just buy a whole new machine...

 

SSD internally and HD in a caddy in the optical bay.

 

Ahh yea. I forgot about that.

 

I bought a few...

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Notebook...832535?hash=item4aeda8a597:g:mngAAOSwys5WWDmL

 

A commenter on Askwoody.com (Noel Carboni, I think he's a Microsoft MVP) found that manually installing the March kernel update 3139582 resolved the problem for this month's updates. It worked for me.

http://www.askwoody.com/2016/the-windows-update-takes-forever-problem/comment-page-2/#comment-78040
https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30654503-

 

That's a good idea.
I guess we are using optical drives less and less these days.
Do you have an external optical drive in case you need one?