Laptop upgrade.

[steelemonkey]

I have an elderly Lenovo B590 which seems to be getting slow. Is it feasible to have it upgraded, new processor or whatever, or should I be looking for a new one.
Please don't ask too many technical questions. I know what you lot are like for talking in geekspeak. Keep it simple for an old man.
TIA

[graham_hk]

Get a Mac - more expensive ... but more than worth it as they last way longer and have way less issues in my 20 years of Mac ownership

[Chrisch]

Computers are the spawn of Satan. A week after you buy a new one it starts to run slower due to downloading all sorts of shit of its own accord. Windows 10 "updates" itself every half hour and from time to time it introduces a new fault that stops something or another working as it has for years and you really need a new one. Most computers get slower due to shit in the registry and conflicts in software to update the 4,674 little "apps" that come pre-installed in the OS.

The massive difference I notice in performace on our office machines is the hard drive. We have two solid state machines the rest on old electro-mechanical HDD. The solid state computers run as they should the old shit needs a cup of tea and a bacon sandich to get going in the morning.

A laptop with a solid state hard drive would be a worthwhile replacement IMHO rather than adding memory or so on. There are software patches like CCleaner that can speed things up by getting rid of conflicting old shite but that only goes so far. Reconditioned machines are not really all that expensive (my new desktop was under 300) and the drive really is a world better. (The computer industry is dedicated to filling the world's landfills with poison in the next decade, just in case climate change doesn't kill us).

[Chrisch]

PS - you might want to take a quick look at this - https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/wi...1-home-and-pro as Microsoft are about to introduce yet-another-pointless-upgrade.

[Stuart Keasley]

I have an elderly Lenovo B590 which seems to be getting slow. Is it feasible to have it upgraded, new processor or whatever, or should I be looking for a new one.
Please don't ask too many technical questions. I know what you lot are like for talking in geekspeak. Keep it simple for an old man.
TIA

To answer the question

It might be possible to upgrade cpu, ssd, expand the memory, depending on your specific model, however you'd still be hamstrung by fairly old tech on the motherboard (and therefore on CPU choices), it's also a fairly technical undertaking... if you're not that way inclined, you'd need to get someone to do it for you. So fair bit of cost, reasonable chance of failure for limited improvement.

I'd suggest starting off with a bit of housekeeping to see if you can improve the speed a bit:

- remove unwanted programs using add/remove programs
- delete old files, pictures etc that you don't need any more (if the computer runs out of disk space, it will run very slowly)

It's also worth checking on programs that run on start up. That does get a little more technical, these types of programs can be started in using various methods and wont necessarily be installed as an application, but as a simple check, click on the System Tray icon in right of windows control bar at the bottom of the screen and see how many and what applications/processes are running in the background.

If you can't improve the speed, don't have any geek types you can ask to dig a bit deeper, then a new computer may be the best option. You don't need to spend much to get something fairly high powered by today's standard, and fairly supersonic compared to your current machine

[Doomanic]

Swapping the HDD to an SSD and maxing out the RAM will make a big difference, as will removing all the unused programs and bloatware that inevitably ends up on most systems.

[dwhitlow]

Swapping the HDD to an SSD and maxing out the RAM will make a big difference, as will removing all the unused programs and bloatware that inevitably ends up on most systems.

Replacing the windows bloatware with Linux is also an option and will yield a massive performance gain.

It depends what the OP is comfortable doing, and whether the machine is needed for specific windows applications, or is just an internet browser platform.

[Ken]

https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/m...590_hmm_en.pdf
https://uk.crucial.com/compatible-up...vo/lenovo-b590

It looks like you can only have 8GB of RAM but you can have a reasonably modern SSD. For £100 I suggest upgrading the ram and replacing you hard drive with a 1TB SSD from crucial. Preferably do a complete, from scratch, Windows 10 install. 8GB RAM isn’t enough anymore.

That machine is 8 years old and while Intel have done surprisingly badly at making their processors faster they are probably twice as fast now.

What you should do really depends on what you want to use the machine for. These days you can do everything with an iPad. I just responded to an email to book a space on a Scapa trip and added the diver to an excel spreadsheet that lives in my OneDrive account. I have a similarly old Lenovo to yours (but with more RAM) which I no longer use, although I have a work laptop I can use if I really need to get serious.

The entry level MacBook looks like a good option as does the new Surface Pro 8. It is harder to buy an upgradable laptop now. I bought a Dell for my son’s remote learning last year and had to be careful to find one with user access to memory and disk slots. Make sure and get plenty of RAM (at least 16GB) and SSD if you are not certain it can be upgraded. Big SSDs are horribly expensive from laptop suppliers.

Another way would be to use Windows 365 but it is quite expensive looking if you are not able to sack an IT department to recover the cost https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/wind...-plans-pricing

PS what did you do to Dave that makes him recommend Linux to you?

[Jay_Benson]

I would suggest getting an external drive as well to back up your existing data before you tidy things up.

As has been said a tidying up exercise is a good thing to do as a second step - so dumping unused programmes, pictures, porn, duplicates of photos and music etc., do you need that copy of American werewolf on your hard drive when you have a DVD player, that sort of thing.

If you go down the new route then I have to say that there is not a lot that I can’t do on my iPad that I need my laptop for so I am not sure I would be buying a new laptop any time soon.

[steelemonkey]

Thanks guys.
It seems that upgrading is an expensive way of getting not a lot, so I will ignore that avenue.
Although I have worked inside tower units in the past, added RAM etc, I don't feel comfortable taking the laptop to bits.
I do have an external drive that I keep back ups of all my documents so I can probably remove a lot of stuff from the lappie.
Getting rid of programs is a bit more tricky for me as I am never sure if they are necessary. I have "Should I remove it" installed, but am always worried that I may get rid of something and then find that something else stops working.
This is just for home use, word, excel, internet and of course the most important thing, calculating beer recipes.
I will go through my thousands of photos and have a good clean out. See where I get from there.