Laptop powers on but won't boot, blank screen. What is wrong here?

TheBoyConor

So it is back booted up again and working fine now, starting, shutting down and restarting perfectly.

I hooked the HDD up to my PC via the adapter again and it turns out the disk was corrupted in some way as I couldn't even access the main drive partition on the HDD. After a bit of research I used CHKDSK command in cmd app to recover the disk. Might be handy for future reference... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix13LRGmzk8

She has bought the SSD so I might as well install it anyway. She also bought new RAM since it was only €2 per card apparently.

TheBoyConor

TheBoyConor wrote: »

So it is back booted up again and working fine now, starting, shutting down and restarting perfectly.

I hooked the HDD up to my PC via the adapter again and it turns out the disk was corrupted in some way as I couldn't even access the main drive partition on the HDD. After a bit of research I used CHKDSK command in cmd app to recover the disk. Might be handy for future reference... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix13LRGmzk8

She has bought the SSD so I might as well install it anyway. She also bought new RAM since it was only €2 per card apparently.

the ssd will make a big difference - waiting 10 to 20 seconds to boot up versus 1 to 2 minutes and then the time after login when windows is sorting out the initial processes before you can actually interact with the machine also being vastly improved is a massive user experience boost!

must be 2gb ram stick that she bought - they are going for nothing these days as there is no real market for them.

if that is bringing it from 4gb to 6gb it's a useful boost as a browser with a fair number of tabs will go over 4gb ram usage.

TheBoyConor

Yes, she bought 2x 2GB sticks. So that'll be a doubling of the RAM as it only has 2x 1GB at the moment. Plus i imagine that when the RAM is full, the OS will overflow into a virtual RAM on the SSD, which will also respond much faster than a virtual RAM file on a HDD.

I'd say at this point it is the CPU that will be the limiting factor in this machine's performance.

I was playing with it last night and it seems to be working perfectly though, booting up quick enough and I also sorted out the user folders' permissions issue.

Still, now that I have the W10 notion, I will still just go ahead and install W10 on the SSD and see how well it runs with the upgrade. If it turns out to be a slow disaster, I will just suggest she stay with the HDD with Vista which now appears to be fine.

win 10 on 4gb ram is ok once you don't have a lot of tabs open in chrome with several chrome extensions installed but all modern browsers on windows are memory hogs. none is much better than any other in that respect really.

the ssd will be quicker as a pagefile than a spinning hd obviously.

TheBoyConor

The laptop has the 64 bit AMD processor but would it be recommended to install the 64 bit W10 or the 32 bit version? Would the 32 perform better on a machine with limited specs?

To help things I'd intend on stripping down a lot of the fluff in W10 that adds to the performance burden. Ie, optimise it for performance and disable all the visual effects like transparency, animations etc. Should help some bit.

I don't really have experience of comparing the 2 side-by-side but if the laptop is only going to have max 4gb ram then maybe win 32 might be better.

the main advantage (aside from some software only running on 64-bit and things like virtualisation) is that win 64 can use more than 4gb ram.

but the 32-bit might run a bit faster - not 100% tho.

try both if you have the time

TheBoyConor

Hmm. Thanks.

I think I'll try 64 bit since the laptop is designed for it in theory. If it works good, then great. If it is too slow, i can roll back and do a 32 bit installation.

This is a very good learning experience more than anything I guess. Interesting.

can you let us know how you got on, be interesting to see how that processor copes tbh

windows seems a lot less clone-friendly these days, on a tangent. theres hidden/hard to erase partitions on the old windows drive that can cause issues when you try to wipe and use it as storage (say after installing an ssd)

TheBoyConor

No I'm not cloning onto an SSD for this. I plan on doing a fresh install of W10 onto the new 240GB SATA SSD which I just put into the laptop last night. I might do the install tonight and then manually transfer over all of the files and pictures in the users folder by hooking the HDD up to a USB adapter.

I did do a W10 clone onto an NVMe SSD in a PCIe adapter card in my own retro desktop build on the other thread. Worked fine. It is definitely faster.

TheBoyConor

I installed the 64 bit version of Windows 10 Pro last night. After things settled down it seemed to run fine, reasonably responsive and internet worked fine. Youtube seemed a little slow and janky but it could be my internet connection too because it isn't great.

I had trouble installing the Radeon X1250 graphics driver with the ATI Catalyst Control Centre. No windows 10 support for that. I had to manually install the driver through device manager.

Although it seems to run fine I notice the fan is blowing hard and hot. I suspect the CPU is under a fair bit of pressure to run the OS.

I have researched whether a 32 bit OS will run faster than a 64bit OS on a PC with low end or legacy hardware. It seems to be inconclusive. Some say there is no difference, some say it will run marginally faster but hardly worth the effort, some say it is better to run 64 bit if the hardware supports it.

The ability of 64 bit to utilise far more ram is nullified in this laptop as max ram the motherboard can take is 4GB which is also the ram limit of 32 bit OS. So that benefit of 64 over 32 is not applicable here.

So I have come up with a plan. Tonight I plan on installing the 32 bit of Windows version on a separate partition on the SSD. I will then install HW monitor on both OSs to log CPU, ram usage etc. I'll use the laptop for a while using both OSs. I will then be able to figure out whether the 32 or 64 bit version runs better or if there is no discernible difference.

I plan to activate the OS using a registry tweak i used before for my retro build.

CoBo55

It could be bogging down trying to do updates, any obvious cpu hogs in task manager?

TheBoyConor

Possibly. I'll leave it run for the evening and see does it settle down. I'll shut down as many unnecessary apps and services as I can and get rid of the visual effects.

TheBoyConor

So to update, a few weeks ago I installed a 32bit OS on a separate partition to compare performance. There did not seem to be any noticeable difference between both OSs while using. One was not any faster or slower than the other.
I decided to do a little experiment. Since video playback is arguably one of the most intensive things I played a youtube video full screen and then opened the HW monitor to see CPU utilisation. I'd then take a manual log of the CPU usage every few seconds while the video played for about 5 minutes. I did this process with both 32 and 64 bit systems. I averaged both and to my surprise the 64 bit system actually had a lower CPU usage on average, 77%, while the 32 bit system averaged 89% usage over the duration of the video. Good result from a very basic experiment.

Anyway, the laptop while obviously not near as fast as a newer PC is very usable. It seems to handle everday tasks like browsing internet, using Microsoft office, spotify, browsing photos, etc with relative ease. A little latency but not an unacceptable amount.

To finish off, this evening I handed the laptop back to a very grateful and excited Polish lady who was keen to see all her old photos again, which I had transferred. I was rewarded with a new rucksack, a bottle of cherry vodka and bamboo travel mug, water bottle, and chocolate all in a new laptop backpack. She also bought me a soldering iron. Not a bad deal to be fair. Thank you to all of you for your advice.