Hi all, a bit of advice required…

I’ve inherited a Packard Bell Imedia S1710 PC from my ex (Celeron E3200 (2.4GHz) with 2GB of DDR2 RAM installed (in 2 x 1GB sticks) running Windows 7.

It’s running really slowly and I need something to allow my son to do his P6 online reading tasks (so don’t need a Cray supercomputer).

I’ve no idea why it’s so slow…is it just the age of the PC?

If I have to buy I’m in a quandary whether it would be cheaper/better to upgrade the Processor and add more RAM or buy a refurbished base unit on Ebay (£150 limit).

Any tips/advice?

Stuart

P.s may want to upgrade to Win 10 which might drive the decision!

What I’d do first, because it’s free, is,

Do an in-place upgrade to Windows 10 to associate W10’s activation with the PC, then install W10 again as a clean install. That’ll get rid of any cruft left by the previous owner. Then, evaluate whether it’s still slow.

The Pantium processor is a bit crap, but for light use should be fine. 2Gb is the minimum RAM I’d want to run with, swapping it for 2x2Gb sticks would make a difference.

I’d go for:

Ram + SSD + Reinstall windows.

Keep the old HDD as a slave for data

Should be quicker for less than a refurb. Having had a quick google, probably around £100 – say £35 for 4GB RAM (2x2GB) and £50odd for a SSD drive.

Edit – what Cougar said is correct, but having gone to SSD drives at work I can no longer accept HDD boot times/cloggyness.

Great advice. Cheers! Stuart

Celeron

Yeah. Have thought of that over the last few days!

do you have a means of reinstalling windows7 ? (CD ideally – maybe you can even generate an installer from the existing machine ? I’m sure there are ways of getting the microsoft key from the current setup)

If so, I think I’d look for a cheap motherboard bundle to swap into your old box (check power connectors on your power supply will match), then I’d reinstall w7 and then do the upgrade –> clean W10

IANA(ITguru)

I got 4 1gb ddr2 ram sticks, you can have for free. Depending how many memory slots you have.

simonlovell999 I’ve only got 2 memory slots so thanks for the offer but that’s a no go!

I’m going to pull the trigger on some more RAM and try and do a clean windows 10 install and see how it performs.

Stuart

That model has 2 memory slots:

http://www.mrmemory.co.uk/memory-ram-upgrades/packard-bell/imedia/s1710

I happen to have 2 x 2GB DDR2 DIMMS sat on my desk. Let me know if you want them for the postage. I can also burn you a legit copy of Windows 7 for you to use with your product key, just let me know the Edition.

If you don’t have a CoA certificate sticker on the box and need to extract the product key for a fresh install use magic jelly bean: https://www.magicaljellybean.com/

The processor could probably be upgraded to a Core 2 Duo or possibly a Core 2 Quad obtained for peanuts from ebay, the memory and SSD upgrade will likely be more than enough to get started though.

I’m going to pull the trigger on some more RAM and try and do a clean windows 10 install and see how it performs.

Point of note – the GWX (‘reserve my upgrade’ icon) in Windows 7 does not authorise your PC with the activation servers, that’s done from inside W10. Therefore you must do an in-place upgrade at least once before doing a clean install. If you don’t, Windows 10 won’t activate and your only recourse is to flatten it, install W7 / W8.1 from scratch, activate that and then do the in-place upgrade.

I’ll give you one guess how I know this. I may have said a naughty word.

Putting an SSD in that would be like putting a jet engine in an allegro imo.

But it’s a totally fit for purpose build as it is. Step one, I don’t think anyone mentioned, clean it out in case it’s full of dust and overheating. Clean windows install. It’ll still be old but it should be as good as it was when it was new.

I may actually have a much faster core 2 processor that’d fit in it. Then again I may have given it to someone else. I’ll have a look.

Lastly though… Decent refurb builds aren’t expensive, don’t spend countless hours or much money on it unless you’re weird and enjoy it.

Do you need Windoze and can the reading tasks be done with Linux? Better performance for no £

Do you need Windoze and can the reading tasks be done with Linux? Better performance for no £

Have you tried W10? The upgrade is free so it’s well worth trying. It’s made a 2Gb RAM Netbook thing into a very usable PC for the kids. I’d give the OPs computer a go as is, though I think the SSD in my netbook is maybe covering a few sins.