Old computer getting slow, want some answers (is this a healthy HD?) - Hardware & Software

My mom's desktop is around 7 years old or so and it's been kind of slowing down recently. I'm wondering if it's starting to die finally. It's OS has never been reinstalled since being bought (though it did receive service pack upgrades), It's rarely turned off, and never had a part replaced except for the PSU due to it's fan bearings going bad and making a horrendous noise. It's a Compaq Presario S4200NX. Specs: Win. XP Home edition or whatever it was called, 32-bit of course Intel Celeron @ 2.6GHz 512 MB of RAM Some Intel Graphics Accelerator chipset thing 120 GB HD (Make unknown) Since I ran several hundred virus scans with AVG and MBAM, even in safe mode, many many CCleaner rounds, and a defrag, twice since it never had it before, it's still been kind of slow. I ran an HDTune test to see if maybe that was the issue. Well, the error scan brought up nothing bad, but I don't know how to read the health thinger. [img]http://filesmelt.com/dl/temp1.PNG[/img] Is this considered a healthy hard drive for it's age? And what could be slowing the old clunker down, just plain old age? And don't just suggest "Get a new computer" or anything related because we don't have enough money to just shell out anything over $100 for a computer for simple browsing and school-related things. (btw scuse how I worded some things, I'm not very tech smart about certain things)

A P4 Celeron is a pretty weak CPU, and 512 MB of RAM is woefully inadequate for today's ever more RAM hungry applications. I'd suggest upgrading both the CPU and the RAM if you want a faster machine, you can do both for less than $100 As for the hard drive, "Spin Retry Count" is the number of times the hard drive controller had to retry spinning up the platters to running speed, which could be an indication of mechanical failure. Though the drive is so old that it could be spread over the 3 year life of its running time.

Meh, Format, reinstall windows and it will be fast again.

[QUOTE=bohb;26667586]A P4 Celeron is a pretty weak CPU, and 512 MB of RAM is woefully inadequate for today's ever more RAM hungry applications. I'd suggest upgrading both the CPU and the RAM if you want a faster machine, you can do both for less than $100 As for the hard drive, "Spin Retry Count" is the number of times the hard drive controller had to retry spinning up the platters to running speed, which could be an indication of mechanical failure. Though the drive is so old that it could be spread over the 3 year life of its running time.[/QUOTE] The RAM thing could be easily taken care of, but I don't know the model of the motherboard and if it's supported anymore by any recent processors. Not to mention I'm not sure if the PSU would be up to standards wattage wise, I'd need to check that, too. Also I don't see how that could be a reason since it doesn't make any strange noises on boot-up or while running that would tell me that it's trying to spin it up again to make it go faster... Honestly I think some of those numbers are bogus but you never know. [editline]13th December 2010[/editline] [QUOTE=tratzzz;26667670]Meh, Format, reinstall windows and it will be fast again.[/QUOTE] No XP install disc anymore. Besides I think it's more then just "XP needs reformatted". And mom has things she can't back up on it and really wants to save.

The board is likely a socket 478, so the fastest CPU it would likely be able to support is a P4 3.2 or 3.4, which you can get cheaply off of ebay. As for the RAM, you can get DDR memory from newegg.com still.

Okay, I'll consider that. Thank you. Mom's an eBay master so that makes it all the more easier.

If there's something you really want to save I would try to get it backed up before it's too late. DVD burners can be had for $20 nowadays.

The computer already has a CD-RW drive, so unless he has more than a few GB of stuff, then it will work fine.

Hmm... Well, in the event we don't have any CDs to use.... (on hand anyways) Oh! Maybe I could get mom to try to learn Linux... That'd be great on an older computer, right? Since it isn't so heavy on the computer itself? Bahhh, I don't know. The Linux thing would be perfect since we have a few flash drives sitting around... Backing up wise, I forgot about my 1 TB external.... ... Say I had an .ISO of an XP install, and used the code from another disc that has been since lost but the code retained... Would that be legal to do? And can .ISOs work off of external hard drives to install on a computer?

It depends on which version of Linux you use. Some of the modern distros are bloated and require pretty beefy machines to run them. The KDE 4.x desktop environment is pretty terrible and uses tons of system resources. If you can get an ISO of XP, you have to burn it to a CD, you can't run it off a hard drive. You could use something like alcohol 52%, but as soon as it rebooted the computer to finish the install, you'd be stuck. If you have a XP product key for that version of Windows, you can use other media than the original install CD.

if you're going for linux, make sure to install Debian with the XFCE or LXDE desktop environments (you have to go into options before doing this though or it will install GNOME by default which is kinda harsh on the system resources also) or plain and simple xubuntu

I think I'd just try to use whatever would be easier... I think I might just reinstall XP + new CPU and some more RAM. That'd probably be sufficient. Thank you guys.

If you do decide to use Linux on that machine down the road, Lubuntu would probably be the most user-friendly option. Short demo: [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57tcBHmIj0Y&feature=fvst[/media]

I can't read moonspeak. :downs: Doesn't matter though, I understood the point it was trying to get across. I'll consider it.