Help me reinvigorate my Dell Vostro 3500??

BenEadir

Hi all,

I've a 2 year old Dell Vostro 3500 with the following spec:-
- i5 M520 2,4GHz
- 4GB Ram
- Windows 7 Professional 32 bit
- 450GB HDD with 27GB free (I've a load of old documents, home movies etc on it)

Recently the machine has been taking up to 7-8 minutes to fully start up from power off. It initiates the welcome screen but takes forever before I'm offered the login and even then after I've logged in it is very slow for a few minutes until it's done whatever it does. Once all the background stuff is done and I'm using it it clips along at an acceptable pace but the start up is a) worrying me and b) taking longer and longer.

There are two things I'd appreciate some input on:-

1. What is the best way for me to get the archived movies and documents I want to keep into the cloud rather than stuck on my laptop HDD? Should I use something like DropBox? Assuming I'll continue to need more and more space as the years go by which service offers the most space and is robust? I don't want to save a few quid by going with some company who will be out of business in 6 months and I lose all my archived data.

2. What housekeeping should I do to speed up the startup and performance of the machine overall? I already defragmented it. what else should I be doing??

Thanks guys. I really want to get another year or two out of this laptop if I can.

Cheers,

Ben

bonzodog2

Try hibernating; downside is you need as much disk space for it as you have RAM.
Ccleaner it and disable autostart items that don't need to.

Khannie

BenEadir wrote: »

Recently the machine has been taking up to 7-8 minutes to fully start up from power off.

:eek:

There's something badly wrong there. That laptop has a very decent spec. Maybe it's trying to start a service at boot time that it can't and it just times out waiting for it. As suggested, suspend might help a bit. I'll move this to the windows forum. You might get a better response there. (I'm assuming this is a windows problem, shout in there if you want this moved elsewhere).

BopNiblets

Put the OS on one partition, everything else on another, W7 safely needs around 15-20 gigs (not sure) so make your C drive that size, then have a D drive with music, documents and movies on it, then you can easily reinstall the OS in the future.
You might need an external drive to hold them temporarily.

Fysh

Your drive's almost full (as in, less than 10% space free) and that always accompanies a degradation of performance. TBH unless you need those home movies on the machine's internal drive (as in, you regularly use them or do editing work with them) I'd shunt a load of that stuff off to an external drive. You can also use hibernation to substantially improve startup times, though it's not a cure-all.

Use the Computer Management interface (Right-click on Computer, select "Manage" or alternatively use Run > compmgmt.msc, though you'll need to be sure to use the Run As Administrator option from the context menu) to look at the Event Viewer and see what's happening at startup in terms of system services.

Use msconfig to check what applications are running at startup and disable anything unnecessary. Check if you've got ReadyBoost enabled and try disabling it - I've found that over time it can lead to slower startup on some machines, and usually disabling it helps resolve the problem.

You should also run some partition and drive management. Run Chkdsk, defragment the disk and use the Acronis Drive Monitor to check for any SMART errors on the drive.

BenEadir

Thanks everyone, some good suggestions there for me to get working on.

In terms of permanently storing movies, photo's and archived documents etc in the cloud what recommendations would you have? I'm familiar with Dropbox as a brand but that's about it. Is there a service where I can 'rent' say 1TB to permanently store all the family stuff in the cloud rather than on an external HDD which will get thrown out by accident or have coffee spilled on it etc??

If such a service exists what the most practical way to get everything up onto the cloud? I've a 20mb broadband service from UPC at home. Do I just plug into the cloud storage service and upload the 350GB of stuff I probably don't need to have on my laptop and if so will UPC have a meltdown if I'm uploading that amount of data? I guess it would take a week to upload that much data

Ben

Fysh

BenEadir wrote: »

Thanks everyone, some good suggestions there for me to get working on.

In terms of permanently storing movies, photo's and archived documents etc in the cloud what recommendations would you have? I'm familiar with Dropbox as a brand but that's about it. Is there a service where I can 'rent' say 1TB to permanently store all the family stuff in the cloud rather than on an external HDD which will get thrown out by accident or have coffee spilled on it etc??

If such a service exists what the most practical way to get everything up onto the cloud? I've a 20mb broadband service from UPC at home. Do I just plug into the cloud storage service and upload the 350GB of stuff I probably don't need to have on my laptop and if so will UPC have a meltdown if I'm uploading that amount of data? I guess it would take a week to upload that much data

Ben

If you need about 1TB of storage, non-local network storage is not the right way of doing it. (Sorry, I hate the marketing buzz around the ill-defined concept of "the cloud" and try to avoid it where I can).

The point is, you'll have limitations on both connection speeds and bandwidth (data throughput) that are never going to let you transfer anything close to your 1TB in a timely fashion. Even Dropbox.com's highest individual offering ($20 a month) is 100GB.

I appreciate your desire for resilient storage, but I reckon a better solution might be something like a NAS box with RAID 5. Pricey, yes, but it's locally-stored and, assuming you buy disks worth a damn to build your RAID with, it should last a good long while.

I wouldn't want to be buying 4 1TB or 2TB drives + a 4-bay NAS box at the minute though, prices are viciously high because of the drive shortage caused by the flooding in Thailand.

Capt'n Midnight

check your ISP's cap. Unless you have unlimited upload they may try to bill you / bump you up to another service.

You could also share videos with others who might be in them / burn them to DVD

use treesize/spacemonger/sequoiaview to see what is using the space up , in case you find a folder with stuff you know what it is and no longer want it.

BenEadir

Khannie wrote: »

:eek:

There's something badly wrong there. That laptop has a very decent spec. Maybe it's trying to start a service at boot time that it can't and it just times out waiting for it. As suggested, suspend might help a bit. I'll move this to the windows forum. You might get a better response there. (I'm assuming this is a windows problem, shout in there if you want this moved elsewhere).

Hi Khannie,

I'm not an expert user/administrator so unfamiliar with a lot of the "under the hood" admin type activities needed here. I have reviewed the start up programs and processes using the CCleaner utility and didn't see anything which to my untrained eye looked out of place. I also did a full clean up using CCleaner and ran a defrag of the hard drive.

I'm getting a 1TB desktop machine next week so will transfer a huge amount of archive stuff (probably 250GB) to it and let it back itself up using www.carbonite.com which for $59 a year give you unlimited backup volume.

For my working docs (probably less than 5gb) I'll probably subscribe to some sort of Dropbox type service so I don't have to haul the laptop home every night and can access my work file online from the new Desktop via the Dropbbox account.

Do you know if it's possible to have my work files in an offline folder on the laptop so that if I'm working offline and update a file it will automatically update the online Dropbox folder when the laptop next goes online?

I'm still having a terrible time starting up. Hibernation is a stop gap and the machine flies along once it's up and running but it's still taking 14 minutes to go from fully powered off to fully on. It breaks down as follows:-

- The first 6 minutes from power on is just a blank (greyish) screen
- Then the login screen is offered.
- The "Welcome" circle runs after I enter my login and PW and after 6 minutes the desktop screen appears.
- If I select a program to open (usually MS Outlook) it takes a further 2 minutes for it to fully load and be useable.

After that it flies along!!!!

Is there an online diagnostic and repair service anyone here could recommend? I think I saw something advertising such a service from Dell where you install some sort of screen sharing application (like TeamViewer) and they then log onto your machine, diagnose and hopefully fix the problem in exchange for €€€€€'s.

A good or bad idea??

Still looking for and would appreciate some help.

Ben

BenEadir

Bump ^^^^

Any ideas, feedback on the above???

Ben

Fysh

Go here, click "Select a product" and use the Service Tag on the sticker on your laptop's underside to bring up the driver list for your machine. I'm particularly thinking a BIOS update will help here, but graphics and/or chipset drivers are also worth checking.

You also want to download the Diagnostics Utility, and use it to create a bootable diagnostic disc. Use this to test your hardware and check for problems.

There's more advice in my previous post on how to check what's going on at startup - have a look and let us know if you find anything unusual.

matt-dublin

I'm thinking it's slow because you're running 32bit windows

Isnt the usable memory in win 7 32bit 3gb?

bobbytables

Use a 64bit OS to get full use out of your RAM.

NAS with RAID is a good idea, but short term backup to a portable hard drive is cheap & effective (but not long term secure).

Do backup just your photos to a cloud storage provider also. Movies, etc can be gotten again, photos cannot and do not need nearly as much bandwidth to transfer. A few gigs of photos won't raise any eyebrows.

Amazon S3 is pretty damn cheap for this purpose.

Fysh

matt-dublin wrote: »

I'm thinking it's slow because you're running 32bit windows

Isnt the usable memory in win 7 32bit 3gb?

Nope, the 32-bit address space limit is 4GB. However, if you need substantial address space for your GPU (unlikely in this case) you may have less available memory.

Realistically speaking, there's no point in having a 64-bit OS when you're using 4GB of RAM or less - there's no significant advantage.

bobbytables

Actually yeah with no intention of going past 4GB of RAM you are better off sticking with the 32bit OS. You would end up wasting memory on 64bit pointers for an address range that can be mapped using 2^32.

BenEadir

Thanks all,

Turns out the HDD is faulty. It threw out a load of errors when I ran the diagnostic Dell asked me to run and they're shipping me out a replacement today which I'll fit myself.

Fitting it will be the easy part. Re-installing 30+ applications and data will be a major pain in the ass. I guess the upside is I'll end up with a fairly clean machine again.

Another upside is I've moved all my working docs to a Dropbox account and put all the legacy family photo's and movies (all 400GB of them!) onto the new Desktop with carbonite backing them up online so the laptop will remain fairly light data storage wise and the desktop will be fully backed up online.

Cheers,

Ben

spannerotoole

BenThere wrote: »

Thanks everyone, some good suggestions there for me to get working on.

In terms of permanently storing movies, photo's and archived documents etc in the cloud what recommendations would you have? I'm familiar with Dropbox as a brand but that's about it. Is there a service where I can 'rent' say 1TB to permanently store all the family stuff in the cloud rather than on an external HDD which will get thrown out by accident or have coffee spilled on it etc??

If such a service exists what the most practical way to get everything up onto the cloud? I've a 20mb broadband service from UPC at home. Do I just plug into the cloud storage service and upload the 350GB of stuff I probably don't need to have on my laptop and if so will UPC have a meltdown if I'm uploading that amount of data? I guess it would take a week to upload that much data

Ben

There is one service that I know of, mozy.ie . Windows/Mac only though I would recommend installing a program such as duplicati (http://code.google.com/p/duplicati/) to handle your backups for you onto local media (USB Drive) you can get a 2TB drive rather cheaply these days.