How to Revive an Old Slow Laptop

hey there my name is Gary Sims and this is Gary explains now recently I was given an old laptop in fact from one from 2012 that a relative of the family no longer needed now it's got a dual core Celeron in it it had uh just four gigabytes of RAM it had an actual mechanical hard drive and when this thing started up it took a long time before it would kind of become used in fact over five minutes after the desktop appeared the hard disk was just you know thrashing and it was it was unusable basically in fact the person who was using it used to say they'd have to go and turn it on let it warm up a bit leave it for five ten minutes before they'd even try to use it I thought to myself well I reckon I know a way in which I can revive this laptop bring this old laptop from 2012 back to life again it's got a good screen 5.6 inches it's got a good enough battery it holds it for around 45 minutes so it's useful so I thought to myself let me try and see if I can bring bring this back I've rejuvenated and so if you that's what I want to do in this video explain to the steps I took to rejuvenate this PC so if you want to find out more please let me explain foreign six inch screen on it Packard Bell 2012 as I said actual hard drive uh just a dual core Celeron and windows 7. so what did I do well there are three things that can be done to make this laptop uh kind of you know better and bring it to back to life revive it a bit the first is to replace that hard drive because we've got a mechanical hard drive and a laptop mechanical hard drives are notoriously slow so the first step was to change that to an SSD the Second Step was to upgrade the RAM and then the third step was to put on some different software let's start with step one so changing the hard drive is relatively simple first of all if there's any data that you have on the hard drive that you need you need to back it up somehow onto a USB flash drive over your network whatever because once you take out this hard drive that's it you're not going to have access to it certainly on the laptop maybe you could connect to it some other Hal but really you could just consider you no longer have access to that data having done the backup you simply take off the cover most laptops allow you easy access to the hard drive and to the ram just by taking off some kind of plastic cover with one or two screws take off the cover you'll see the hard drive in there you can just slot it out if it has a cradle you put the SSD in the Cradle if it doesn't even have a cradle you just put the SSD in its place uh screw the cover back on and that's it you've now got that brand new SSD in there now I went for a one terabyte drive the reason I went with one so big of course it could have gone with a 480 or even a you know 256 one is because I wanted to install two operating systems on it and have it dual boot with the advantage of an older laptop like this it's relatively simple to do dual boot between Windows and Linux you could go with a smaller one I spent around 45 on that drive at about 40 euros now the second step is to upgrade the RAM again taking off that same plastic cover you'll find the Ram this one had DDR3 RAM very quick just to look up online for DDR3 RAM for a laptop not for repeat uh desktop they are different sizes but for the laptop check the frequency this was a 1066 one and then I was just able to order eight gigs online to fill up both stores now I could have just ordered a second four gigabyte there was four gigabytes in there already but I thought to myself would I best get two the same uh just to make sure everything the Dual dual Channel memory works perfectly it would have probably been okay with just one but I thought that they're relatively cheap nowadays I won't take the risk I'll just stick in two new uh Slots of ram there so again you can just pop them out using the clips took the two new ones put them in four gig each give me eight gigs in total screw the plastic cover back on and now I've doubled the RAM and having also upgraded the SSD things are starting to look good now those Ram modules cost me around 35 that's 30 Euros for eight gigabytes of RAM now there's not really much hotels I can do about the process of the inside of it also the screen keyboard these all come integrated not a lot I can do however I do have a choice of what software I run now this was running Windows 7 but I did opt to put Windows 10 on it because at least that would give me some updates for a little bit longer and it's still a very popular operating system so you need to download Windows 10 Microsoft have a media creation tool you need to put that onto USB you need to boot off that and then just follow the instructions to install that one thing to note when you get to the bid about the hard drive I actually went through the custom install and made sure I only set it to install on just half of the free space rather than on the full review space and you do that just by hitting the new Partition button and then specifying the size to be around half of what's in there then Windows 10 installed fine now Windows 10 is up and running I've got Wi-Fi working okay I'm using the Microsoft default display driver I don't think it has much acceleration because watching YouTube at 1080p does make the CPU max out at a hundred percent also the trackpad isn't doing everything it should do I can't get gestures to work so I'm actually having to go up and scroll bars down you know with the mouse rather than using two fingers or whatever else the gestures are but besides that it's up and running and working fine great for productivity great for web browsing you can still watch 720p video on it without too much of a problem Netflix and so on all looking good but as I said what I really want to do is better Windows or Linux on this so I went and looked for Linux uh so many distributions to choose from obviously at the moment we're avoiding things like Centos Fedora really you shouldn't get involved in those because of the way red hat is treating the open source community at the moment so I went with Linux Mint I went with the lightweight version Again download that onto a USB drive full instructions are available on the Linux Mint website booted that up and it said hey oh you've already got Windows 10 here why don't I just use that free space that you've left and then you can have a Windows 10 and Linux together side by side and that's what I did and it worked absolutely great once it booted up I was actually able to see that the video driver is much better and the Linux for this older Hardware I was able to watch 1080p exactly the same video only about 50 of the CPU being used so that was a win-win situation again Wi-Fi is working and the trackpad was working under Linux so I was able to use two fingers for scrolling and all that kind of stuff so actually it looks like Linux is a better proposition on this older laptop but I do have the option to boot into Windows if I need to so in summary what have I done I've put in a new SSD I've doubled the amount of RAM and I've changed the operating system and and I've got windows on there but specifically I've got a lightweight version of Linux Mint which actually is working really really well and so it's brought this laptop a whole new lease of life it can certainly be used for the next three four years is a future without really any many problems for light productivity videos and streaming web browsing and things like that so the more of this stories you don't have to throw away old laptops even if they are over 10 years old there's still a way to make them useful I'd love to hear your stories of how you've revived old laptops do tell me in the comments below okay that's it my name is Gary Sims this is Gary explains I really hope you found this video useful if you did please do give it a thumbs up if you like these kind of videos why not stick around by subscribing to the channel you can also follow me on social media or the trendy handles are here on the screen okay that's it I'll see in the next one [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Gary Explains

Views: 18,451

Keywords: Gary Explains, Tech, Explanation, Tutorial, revive laptop, old laptop, slow laptop, ram upgrade, hard drive upgrade, upgrade to SSD, windows 10, upgrade old laptop, laptop upgrade, linux

Id: HVzve9KNBeQ

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 18 2023