# Computer question cos i am a thickie..



## postman (2 Nov 2020)

Ok so ages weeks ago I bought a keyboard ,cos I thought the lagging and slow scrolling was down to the mouse and battery.Well three weeks or so later.The scrolling has got worse.The tower is so old it has Windows Vista.So could the tower be coming to the end of its life,or is it the fact we downgraded the Virgin tv package months ago,reducing the tv channels and more importantly the broadband speed.Cos I am thinking of doing something like increasing the speed or buying another tower.Idont want to do both,if one is ok.


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## GetFatty (2 Nov 2020)

Try running Speedtest (speedtest.net) to get a speed for your connection. Unless you've really cut the broadband speed, my gut feeling would be the tower. Vista was never a great OS in the first place and maybe hogging resources.

What do you use the tower for? If it's just for browsing email etc, it could be worth trying Linux. That said new towers can be had fairly cheaply nowadays.


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## byegad (2 Nov 2020)

Vista was pants, Lady Byegad bought a Dell laptop identical in every respect to mine, which I bought a couple of months before her. Mine was W98, hers Vista. Mine worked well, hers was utter pants, and mine had 3 times the programs put on it by me.


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## Cycleops (2 Nov 2020)

Bin the old Windows PC and go out and buy yourself a budget tablet or a iPad if you're a bit flush. You'll never regret it. iOS just runs so smoothly and so easy to use.


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## si_c (2 Nov 2020)

byegad said:


> Vista was pants, Lady Byegad bought a Dell laptop identical in every respect to mine, which I bought a couple of months before her. Mine was W98, hers Vista. Mine worked well, hers was utter pants, and mine had 3 times the programs put on it by me.


Vista was actually fine. The problem was most vendors sold hardware unsuitable to it as Vista Ready and it wasn't capable of running it at the time. If you had a mid-range to high end system there were never any problems.


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## jowwy (2 Nov 2020)

Cycleops said:


> Bin the old Windows PC and go out and buy yourself a budget tablet or a iPad if you're a bit flush. You'll never regret it. iOS just runs so smoothly and so easy to use.


unless he needs the pc for work and to run windows programmes, then the tablet/ipad would be pants


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## si_c (2 Nov 2020)

postman said:


> Ok so ages weeks ago I bought a keyboard ,cos I thought the lagging and slow scrolling was down to the mouse and battery.Well three weeks or so later.The scrolling has got worse.The tower is so old it has Windows Vista.So could the tower be coming to the end of its life,or is it the fact we downgraded the Virgin tv package months ago,reducing the tv channels and more importantly the broadband speed.Cos I am thinking of doing something like increasing the speed or buying another tower.Idont want to do both,if one is ok.


I'd say that the tower has come to the end of it's life more or less - it's probably at least decade old and most modern browsers and websites are overloaded with stuff that runs in the background - for older computers this causes problems as they simply weren't designed to cope with this.

I'm experiencing similar with my old laptop - i've prolonged it's life by upgrading the memory to 8GB from the stock 4GB and swapping in an SSD but it's life limited and that's a top end laptop from 2012.

Your internet bandwidth will have no bearing on the performance of the computer and wouldn't cause slow scrolling or mouse movement for certain.


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## GetFatty (2 Nov 2020)

si_c said:


> Vista was actually fine. The problem was most vendors sold hardware unsuitable to it as Vista Ready and it wasn't capable of running it at the time. If you had a mid-range to high end system there were never any problems.


I had a high spec machine when Vista came out. The number of blue screens was unbelievable and I eventually just gave up and binned it as an operating system


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## byegad (2 Nov 2020)

si_c said:


> Vista was actually fine. The problem was most vendors sold hardware unsuitable to it as Vista Ready and it wasn't capable of running it at the time. If you had a mid-range to high end system there were never any problems.


That's a bit like telling a 2CV owner he should have bought a Jaguar, because the petrol would work better.😏


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## si_c (2 Nov 2020)

byegad said:


> That's a bit like telling a 2CV owner he should have bought a Jaguar, because the petrol would work better.😏


Not at all - the correct comparison in this case would be Citroen for selling a jaguar shell with a 2cv powerplant.


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## ColinJ (2 Nov 2020)

I would suggest that anybody who doesn't do anything particularly hardware-taxing on a computer (e.g. making music, editing HD movies, gaming...) should just buy a Chromebook. A friend of mine took some persuading, but eventually took my advice - she loves it!


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## si_c (2 Nov 2020)

GetFatty said:


> I had a high spec machine when Vista came out. The number of blue screens was unbelievable and I eventually just gave up and binned it as an operating system



I can't speak to your experience, but there were a few issues at launch with some peripherals - the driver ecosystem wasn't as it should have been as the system wasn't compatible with the older hardware - this meant lots of poorly written drivers.

That being said most of the problems were fixed reasonably quickly and the system became very good. I appreciate that you're not the only one who gave up very quickly and went back to XP - another OS which had huge teething problems but became very good over time.


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## Profpointy (2 Nov 2020)

si_c said:


> Vista was actually fine. The problem was most vendors sold hardware unsuitable to it as Vista Ready and it wasn't capable of running it at the time. If you had a mid-range to high end system there were never any problems.



To be fair that's very much a minority view. XP was the first adequately solid version for PC use (NT being more server focussed), perhaps the first one which was a even aproper operating system, albeit 95/98 were at least usable. Vista was rightly derided by most users, windows 7 was excellent, windows 8 - pants, windows 10 again excellent


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## si_c (2 Nov 2020)

Profpointy said:


> To be fair that's very much a minority view. XP was the first adequately solid version for PC use (NT being more server focussed), perhaps the first one which was a even aproper operating system, albeit 95/98 were at least usable. Vista was rightly derided by most users, windows 7 was excellent, windows 8 - pants, windows 10 again excellent



I know  

A lot of people again forget that Windows 7 built upon and tweaked a few things from Vista - they fixed a few issues such as UAC which were too intrusive and tweaked the interface a little but by and large they were very similar - certainly the kernel was almost identical and they had the same updated driver model. Nearly all of problems with Vista - inadequate hardware aside - were fixed by the time SP1 came around about 18 months later, but it was replaced again by Windows 7 18 months or so after that, which in the lifecycle of Windows was reasonably short. Ironically the improvements in hardware driven in part by Vista meant that Windows 7 was far more favourable received.

Windows 8 was a shoot-show, but the OS itself was great, but they fscked up with the UI changes - I got used to them quite quickly and ended up liking them somewhat, but the I've always been more keyboard focussed than mouse. Windows 10 again fixed the problems with Windows 8 but added little new.

Microsoft should have done what Apple did and they themselves do now - slow incremental changes to the OS with new features delivered piecemeal.


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## OldShep (2 Nov 2020)

ColinJ said:


> I would suggest that anybody who doesn't do anything particularly hardware-taxing on a computer (e.g. making music, editing HD movies, gaming...) should just buy a Chromebook. A friend of mine took some persuading, but eventually took my advice - she loves it!


I agree. I had an old Vista laptop which became an absolute pain in the virtual derrière. Converted it to a Chromebook and it’s a completely different machine. http://www.neverware.com/


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## Sterlo (2 Nov 2020)

The other issue Postman, depending on what you do, there is little is any security or support for Vista these days. Should you get hacked, the authorities will do little about it because of the age. They're almost disposable items nowadays, within a couple of years of a new version coming out, they stop supporting older versions, even Windows 7 is no longer supported. If you do any sort of online buying/selling/banking, I would definitely recommend upgrading to a newer version, Windows 10 if poss. You can pick up Chromebooks reasonably cheaply if you shop around.


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## Salar (2 Nov 2020)

I pads, my better half uses one for her business. I've tried it and can't get on with it.

Give me a proper PC anytime.


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