I guess. I have a laptop which must be six years old. It’s brilliant! Huge screen, cost me a fortune from a well known online computer company who allow custom builds.

But it’s running Vista. I suspect it’s not worth buying a new OS but thought I’d ask the experts. No problems with deleting everything and starting over – it’s all backed up or worthless. Any advice very much appreciated.

I’ve got linux mint cinnamon on my ‘I don’t want to part with it’ 17″ old laptop. I bought the disks online as couldn’t be bothered learning how to download it. I think it cost £7 and I got 5 different versions of linux to try or maybe £5 and i got 7 different versions. Works well, there’s a bit of a learning curve, but linux mint is the most user friendly linux I believe?.

Stick W10 on it.

£27 at https://softwaregeeks.co.uk

YGM

Cheers guys. Honestly didn’t think there were options.

You can get a win 10 licence cheap or even free if you are prepared to bend the rules a little.
And it will run better than vista as it’s more refined.

Same caveats apply, turn off all the junk that you dont want.

Mint and Ubuntu are good Linux versions for beginners, but they can be very limiting if you are not used to them.

I’d suggest running Linux off a USB stick to start with to see.

6 years ain’t too ancient especially if it was high-end, throw w10 on it and crack on. It’s a nice OS.

as mentioned, get w10 for free if you need assistance

there’s no indication what the assistance need be. Use your own judgement

Bah. Seems that error(null) is not a valid W32 application

6 years ain’t too ancient especially if it was high-end, throw w10 on it and crack on. It’s a nice OS.

My primary laptop came with Vista, it’s 2008 vintage and is happily booting W10 about.

as mentioned, get w10 for free if you need assistance

You can still readily download W10 and install it with a W7 or W8.1 licence key. I’ll give you a genuine W7 Pro key in exchange for a year’s Premier STW sub.

W10 not ment to reasonably decent on lesser computers anyhow?

W10 not ment to reasonably decent on lesser computers anyhow?

Dunno who says that but like W7, W10 is great in older kit. Vista was a power hungry monster that only ran well on decent kit, so if it ran that well, W10 will be fine IMHO. Stick a SSD in it, would help extend the laptops overall usable life too

Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC
RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit
Hard disk space: 16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS
Graphics card: DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver
Display: 800×600

Minimum Specs for Win 10, it’s running on some very light weight systems these days so well worth a look. Just keep it nice and light and clean and it should run OK.

I’m in the same boat, old laptop with Vista, no other issues. How come there’s such cheap copies of W10 out there, what’s the catch?

I assume they’re not technically legal. They’ll be OEM licences which you’re not supposed to transfer between PCs. Still works though.

My ~6/7 year old laptop (originally Win7) runs W10 perfectly well.

It’s also a 17″ – i5 with 6Gb of RAM, but I suspect you need far less than that.

Only issue I had updating to win10 was that the slidey scroll bits on the trackpad stopped working & there didn’t seem to be drivers available from Acer or the trackpad manufacturer to fix this.
Then one day, W10 updated & it started working all of a sudden, so now everything works just fine….

It could probably do with a clean install – it’s never been done. But, I am kind of in the ‘if it ain’t broke’ mindset……!

I assume they’re not technically legal.

they rely on some EU legislation that says you can’t stop someone selling second hand software – each licence is installed on an ‘OEM’ PC and then uninstalled. They can then sell it as secondhand under EU law and Microsoft have to accept it as a genuine licence key.

Post Brexit? Who knows.

I suspect it’s not worth buying a new OS but thought I’d ask the experts.

It is worth it.

Windows has been getting lighter and quicker since Vista. W10 runs perfectly well on my 8 year old Celeron dual core.

they rely on some EU legislation that says you can’t stop someone selling second hand software – each licence is installed on an ‘OEM’ PC and then uninstalled. They can then sell it as secondhand under EU law and Microsoft have to accept it as a genuine licence key.

I don’t know about that. Folk have always sold OEM keys. It’s in breach of MS’s licensing agreement, but it works because they’re valid keys and no-one seems to care sufficiently to enforce it. As far as I can tell MS value people moving to W10 more than they value a dollar amount for the OS.