Windows 7 End of Life Announcement

[Ming the Merciless]

If I can find the time, I would like to study what makes Linux tick. I used to fall asleep in my 'Operating systems and networks' lectures because we had a lecturer with a very soporific voice and I would be dozy after a hearty lunch. On the rare occasions when I stayed awake I found the lectures interesting!

The Linux philosophy tends to be do one thing, and do it well. So you have a small focused kernel, then you add other small packages for the stuff you want to do. The advantage of small and focused on one thing of course is that it generally makes things very easy to get right and test. But you potentially have lots of packages hence package managers.

 

[Mart44]

I have had two Intel NUCs, both blew up with minimal use. I wont be getting another!

This is good to know.

 

[alicat]

This post might take this thread off at a slight tangent and I'm hoping that's okay because the original query has been answered imho and the right people are gathered here.

In late December I bought a s/h Lenovo notebook running Ubuntu. I've really enjoyed learning a new operating system etc. However I am finding that the system sometimes runs quite slow when I am online. The chap in the shop did warn me that the laptop was a bit underpowered and I went ahead because my MacBook Air had just died and my smartphone didn't have enough grunt to feed my surfing dependency.

Anyway, to stop rambling, I only have 2GB of RAM and I understand from googling that I can't add any more because the RAM is soldered to the motherboard. What can I do to speed up processing? Delete unneeded apps? Keep the open browser tabs to a minimum? Upgrade the hard drive? Buy something else and accept that I've had enough fun from this machine? Anything else I haven't thought of?

The full specs of my little bundle of joy and sometimes frustration are:

Lenovo Yoga 300-11IBY
Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS
Gnome 3.28.2
DDR3L-1333 MHz 2GB RAM
32Gb SSD

All tips and what were you thinking of buying that gratefully received. Thank you.

 

[DCBassman]

This post might take this thread off at a slight tangent and I'm hoping that's okay because the original query has been answered imho and the right people are gathered here.

In late December I bought a s/h Lenovo notebook running Ubuntu. I've really enjoyed learning a new operating system etc. However I am finding that the system sometimes runs quite slow when I am online. The chap in the shop did warn me that the laptop was a bit underpowered and I went ahead because my MacBook Air had just died and my smartphone didn't have enough grunt to feed my surfing dependency.

Anyway, to stop rambling, I only have 2GB of RAM and I understand from googling that I can't add any more because the RAM is soldered to the motherboard. What can I do to speed up processing? Delete unneeded apps? Keep the open browser tabs to a minimum? Upgrade the hard drive? Buy something else and accept that I've had enough fun from this machine? Anything else I haven't thought of?

The full specs of my little bundle of joy and sometimes frustration are:

Lenovo Yoga 300-11IBY
Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS
Gnome 3.28.2
DDR3L-1333 MHz 2GB RAM
32Gb SSD

All tips and what were you thinking of buying that gratefully received. Thank you.

I think you'll find it has a ram slot somewhere, as it is specced up to 8GB. That would certainly be the first thing to do. Then see if fitting a bigger SSD is possible.

 

[alicat]

I'll open the back and have a look when I am feeling brave. However, Crucial only shows hard drive updates and no RAM updates so I am wondering if the RAM is soldered to the motherboard. Only one way to find out, I guess.

 

[DaveReading]

Crucial, who know a thing or two about RAM, only offer SSD upgrades for that Yoga on their website: https://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/compatible-upgrade-for/Lenovo/yoga-300-11iby

They describe the Lenovo's RAM as "Standard Memory: 2GB to 8GB non-removable", suggesting that whatever RAM option you choose at purchase time, you're stuck with.

 

[alicat]

That's what I thought, @Dave Reading. So, I'm wondering what my best options are given that I can't replace the RAM.

 

[ColinJ]

In late December I bought a s/h Lenovo notebook running Ubuntu. I've really enjoyed learning a new operating system etc. However I am finding that the system sometimes runs quite slow when I am online. The chap in the shop did warn me that the laptop was a bit underpowered and I went ahead because my MacBook Air had just died and my smartphone didn't have enough grunt to feed my surfing dependency.

General 'surfing' isn't a particularly demanding activity! My ancient Dell is managing to do it perfectly happily with Linux installed.

When you say "sometimes runs quite slow" do you mean that sometimes doing exactly the same thing it runs much slower than at other times, or do you mean there are some online tasks that it is always slow at? If it is the former, then the machine is basically fast enough, but something slows it down at other times.

Obviously, if you have scores of tabs open at once then your machine might be running out of memory and keeping the number of tabs down would help. I rarely have more than 4 or 5 tabs open at once.

My Dell can't play HD YouTube videos properly, so I do have to watch them in small windows or use lower resolution. It has slow onboard graphics which weren't really designed to run HD but HD wasn't a big thing on laptops way back in 2007/8!

I think you'll find it has a ram slot somewhere, as it is specced up to 8GB. That would certainly be the first thing to do.

Not neccessarily... as suggested by alicat and DaveReading, some Lenovos have the RAM soldered onto the motherboard - mine certainly does. It is a case of deciding how much to buy at the time of purchase. I settled on 8 GB and that has been ok so far, but I slightly regret not spending the extra to get 16 GB.

 

[alicat]

Hi @ColinJ. What I mean is that I sometimes get messages saying that running a particular webpage is making the browser run slowly whereas my desktop running Win 10 does not show the same message. The website in question is an online budget called YNAB.

I am prone to opening a tab and leaving it open until I am sure I don't need it again. For example I have 13 open at the moment.

 

[DCBassman]

If the tabs have pages open that are running scripts, that's normally what the message refers to.
Basically, even 13 is too many if several are hogging resources.

 

[alicat]

^^^ thank you, @DCBassman. I'll get in the habit of closing websites especially the more interactive ones like my budget.

 

[Pale Rider]

I reckon broadband speeds vary more than the service providers would have you believe.

A £150 Chromebook is capable of snappy websurfing.

But if my suspicion is correct and your problem is broadband speed there's no point in buying another machine of any spec.

 

[MontyVeda]

When i was a kid i used to drive my mother mad... I'd get my lego out and play with it for ten minutes before setting up my trainset. Five minutes later I'd get bored of trains and set up the racing car set instead, then i'd leaf through some books, maybe play meccano for a while... not putting anything away and leaving a day's worth of toys, books and games all over the bedroom floor.

I'm exactly the same on my PC and laptop. I have numerous windows open, several word docs, photoshop, winamp, utorrent. I have 6 browser tabs that open by default, plus whatever else I'm browsing: FB, CC, free dictionary, wikipedia, etc. 10 browser tabs is not only normal but a minimum for me... both machines easily cope with the hammering I gives them, despite what people say about the amount of windows/tabs I have open. (Laptop has 2ghz CPU & 3gb RAM - Desktop has 2.5ghz APU & 8gb RAM)

As Pale Rider says... it may well be your BB speed slowing to a snail's pace.

Either that or a single running process will be hogging your CPU. Boot up Task Manager when it's going slow and have a look at the graphs on the performance tab. Then on the processes tab, order everything by CPU and Memory and you should be able to work out what's hogging your resources.

 

[MontyVeda]

To add.... on my older, slower machines, it was often windows explorer crashing (can't think why)... to rectify, I'd right click on it (in task manager) and end the process, then open run new task and type explorer.exe to boot it up again ...that way it could cope with a gazillion open windows for another day or two.

 

[presta]

Anyone having problems with W10 backups? I've got someone on the W10 forum warning me off because they're a load of trouble.

Just make sure your UAC prompts are on. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...ccount-control/how-user-account-control-works

I just got more and more confused trying to read up on this, so in the end I just gave up and registered a new email address for the user account. I didn't really want another email account given the choice, but going down a road I don't fully understand seems like a recipe for problems in the future.