considering upgrading to win 7

Stoner

I have a HP Pavillion tx1000 notebook, it has 2 GB of ram and an AMD turion 64x2 processor running MS vista 32.

I'm considering putting wind 7 64 on to it. It appears that I can fit a max of 4Gb of ram into the notebook (officially 2GB but others have it running with 4GB)

I'm wondering if its worth my while upgrading, I find the PC slow at the moment with poor battery life and I'm not sure if win 7 64 will be too heavy for it.

I popped Jolicloud Joli OS on it a couple of weeks ago and I'm happy with it as it found my windows shares and I use google apps and docs for work a lot so it suits me, I might just stick with it to be honest VLC player etc all works well, however battery life is still only about 1 hour, I hoped for more.

If the result will be a sluggish win 7 notebook then I'd actually just stick with Joli OS / Ubuntu Netbook solution that I'm using at the moment. The notebook is in good condition I don't use it that much and it has a nice screen, it would be a shame not to use it, and TBH not having to download updates and ant virus is a help to.

Any ideas on upgrading, I know I can do it and have a dual boot solution but I dont know if it will be a waste of money, essentially if win 7 64 is "lighter" than win vista 32 then I'll upgrade

also is there any reasonable way to inject more life/improve the performance of the battery?

kilianmanning

Stoner wrote: »

I have a HP Pavillion tx1000 notebook, it has 2 GB of ram and an AMD turion 64x2 processor running MS vista 32.

I'm considering putting wind 7 64 on to it. It appears that I can fit a max of 4Gb of ram into the notebook (officially 2GB but others have it running with 4GB)

I'm wondering if its worth my while upgrading, I find the PC slow at the moment with poor battery life and I'm not sure if win 7 64 will be too heavy for it.

I popped Jolicloud Joli OS on it a couple of weeks ago and I'm happy with it as it found my windows shares and I use google apps and docs for work a lot so it suits me, I might just stick with it to be honest VLC player etc all works well, however battery life is still only about 1 hour, I hoped for more.

If the result will be a sluggish win 7 notebook then I'd actually just stick with Joli OS / Ubuntu Netbook solution that I'm using at the moment. The notebook is in good condition I don't use it that much and it has a nice screen, it would be a shame not to use it, and TBH not having to download updates and ant virus is a help to.

Any ideas on upgrading, I know I can do it and have a dual boot solution but I dont know if it will be a waste of money, essentially if win 7 64 is "lighter" than win vista 32 then I'll upgrade

also is there any reasonable way to inject more life/improve the performance of the battery?

well yes, vista is considered to be a complete disaster, so basically any computer that came with vista will run windows 7 better & more smoothly. also make sure that fan/heatsink is clean & change the thermal paste if it has never been done. disable all unnecessary programs at startup through msconfig, and use ccleaner regularly to clean all the crap from the computer & clean the registry.

ED E

Vista isn't perfect, but with all the patches and service packs in its not nearly as bad as it was on release, so it doesnt really deserve such a bad name anymore.


Seven will perform slightly better, probably, you'd want to turn off Aero though(the nice graphics). Reinstalling also gives you a full cleanout so that'll always mean a temporary bump in performance.

The thing is, its an old machine(at a guess ~3yrs+ ?) so you're coming to end of life really. Laptops arent designed like desktops where you could buy a box and have it on 24/7 for a decade(some of our old gateways were like that). The main crippling factor will be the battery, it'll wear out after /1.5 to 2.5 yrs depending on usage and usually replacing them isnt economica (€150). Dont go clone, they tend to not be great cells.

You could underclock your CPU to save on power, but that obviously would slow things down.

Stoner

thanks for the advice lads, I think I'll just leave the Joli OS on it so, I never minded Vista that much, I have a media pc running win 7 64 and I have lots of features turned off so i was thinking of this route, but I guess you are correct about the battery, its not worth a new OS, new battery and new ram, I'll just keep it as a gdoc, dropbox type solution which to be honest is about 80 or 90% of my usage anyway, I'll just have to do the other stuff on a PC.