win 10 on 10 year old hardware

Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Richmond wrote:
"Jonathan N. Little" writes:

Turning this crap off surely helps. OP did not say how much RAM he
had. Although 10 supposed to be "lighter" than 7 I have found 2GB
inadequate
especially on a budget CPU, 4GB better and 8GB the preferred amount,
(just my
experience).

I have an old 64 Bit Amd laptop with 1G of RAM. Originally with Vista. I
run 32 bit Windows 10 on it as it uses less RAM than 64 bit. It works OK
but a bit slow.


You must be a very patient guy ;-)


It will work with less memory.

I've run Win10 with the memory in a VM set to 256MB.

In the Preview releases of Windows 8 (before Windows 8 was
really finished), I could run that in 128MB. Later, 256MB
was a better fit.

In the Win10 case, I was still able to open Notepad
and edit a text document. I didn't try opening Firefox
or anything.

When you look in Task Manager, you may find something running
pretty hard, which is labeled "Memory Compression". When you
have 1GB of RAM, that should hardly run at all. At the 256MB level,
for whatever it's doing, it runs at a much higher percentage CPU.
And if you follow the "free memory" in Task Manager, you'll see
the line is a roller coaster - as Windows maintenance things
try to run, and so on.

And I don't know whether it cheats and uses frame buffer
memory for anything or not. The memory management has
changed a couple times, and I've not seen a comparative
article that lays that all out.

If you work with the OSes on real hardware, the behavior
of 7, 8, and 10, in terms of memory quantity, is quite
similar. For all three of them, 1GB is a good value for
quiescent running. If you load up a demanding task, the
OS portion has no problem shrinking to around 350MB or so.
So a 1GB machine, gives 350MB for OS and 650MB for user.
The OS will expand to fill the available space, if there is
no pressure put on it.

Paul

Paul wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Richmond wrote:
"Jonathan N. Little" writes:

Turning this crap off surely helps. OP did not say how much RAM he
had. Although 10 supposed to be "lighter" than 7 I have found 2GB
inadequate
especially on a budget CPU, 4GB better and 8GB the preferred amount,
(just my
experience).

I have an old 64 Bit Amd laptop with 1G of RAM. Originally with Vista. I
run 32 bit Windows 10 on it as it uses less RAM than 64 bit. It works OK
but a bit slow.


You must be a very patient guy ;-)


It will work with less memory.

I've run Win10 with the memory in a VM set to 256MB.

In the Preview releases of Windows 8 (before Windows 8 was
really finished), I could run that in 128MB. Later, 256MB
was a better fit.

In the Win10 case, I was still able to open Notepad
and edit a text document. I didn't try opening Firefox
or anything.
I didn't say it wouldn't work. I said it would be tortuously slow while
trying to do something. There has always be a very optimistic minimum
requirements which MS has listed for each version of Windows that in the
"real world" experience wasn't very practical.

I encountered many a bare-minimum OEM offerings for example with a weak
Celeron paired with 128 MB RAM on Windows XP that were real slugs. We
had a number of Gateways so configured at the library that luckily long
ago have been removed. I have a Compaq 110c 1GB RAM netbook that came
with cripple-ware Windows 7 Starter that only became useful when I
dumped Windows for Ubuntu.

Being skimpy on RAM especially with a weak CPU can have a dramatic
effect on performance. Your system will "run" with a old or budget CPU
with only 1GB of RAM, but really "run" may be too optimistic a word and
more like "walk" or "crawl" if you try to do any real work with it.

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

On Tue, 15 Aug 2017 11:58:29 -0400, Wolf K
wrote:

On 2017-08-15 10:37, Paul wrote:
Wolf K wrote:
On 2017-08-14 23:11, Peter Jason wrote:
On Mon, 14 Aug 2017 22:47:07 -0400, Wolf K
wrote:

On 2017-08-14 19:31, Peter Jason wrote:
[...]
My hardware is 10year old and works OK.

My booting problem such as you describe was caused by the BIOS battery
terminals being tarnished over time and needed a good clean. The
little battery needs its surface polished too.

That's a sign of the battery is dying: at full voltage, the current can
cut through a fair amount of dirt and oxidation.
My old one is working fine after the good clean.

Of course, because you've reduced the surface resistance considerably.
But you'll have to clean it again fairly soon. If I were you I'd make
sure I knew what battery to get when a good clean doesn't work any more.

Good luck,


Surface resistance ?

The battery provides 0 to 10uA of current.
How much surface resistance do you need to drop 0.6V ?

Well, that's been my experience. Clean a button battery, it will work
for a while longer, the quit again. Sometimes a second cleanup will
work, too. But if a cleanup revitalsies the battery, I think it's on its
last legs.

[snip the usual technical and interesting :-) stuff. You really do go to
great lengths to educate us. Thanks.]

My car alarm key-chain gadget has two tiny 1616 disk batteries, and
these need a clean every so often because the alarm canceling function
becomes sluggish over time. They're in my pocket all the time.

Peter Jason wrote:
On Tue, 15 Aug 2017 11:58:29 -0400, Wolf K
wrote:

On 2017-08-15 10:37, Paul wrote:
Wolf K wrote:
On 2017-08-14 23:11, Peter Jason wrote:
On Mon, 14 Aug 2017 22:47:07 -0400, Wolf K
wrote:

On 2017-08-14 19:31, Peter Jason wrote:
[...]
My hardware is 10year old and works OK.

My booting problem such as you describe was caused by the BIOS battery
terminals being tarnished over time and needed a good clean. The
little battery needs its surface polished too.
That's a sign of the battery is dying: at full voltage, the current can
cut through a fair amount of dirt and oxidation.
My old one is working fine after the good clean.
Of course, because you've reduced the surface resistance considerably.
But you'll have to clean it again fairly soon. If I were you I'd make
sure I knew what battery to get when a good clean doesn't work any more.

Good luck,

Surface resistance ?

The battery provides 0 to 10uA of current.
How much surface resistance do you need to drop 0.6V ?
Well, that's been my experience. Clean a button battery, it will work
for a while longer, the quit again. Sometimes a second cleanup will
work, too. But if a cleanup revitalsies the battery, I think it's on its
last legs.

[snip the usual technical and interesting :-) stuff. You really do go to
great lengths to educate us. Thanks.]

My car alarm key-chain gadget has two tiny 1616 disk batteries, and
these need a clean every so often because the alarm canceling function
becomes sluggish over time. They're in my pocket all the time.

The peak power (pulse) could be larger on a thing like that.
It is "high" power for short periods, so the average power
isn't that bad.

They even make key-fob flashlights that run on CRxxxx batteries,
and that wouldn't exactly be low current.

As for the cleaning bit, once you start cleaning, you'll be
cleaning forever. Until you replace one or both contact
surfaces in the thing that doesn't work properly.

Paul

On Tue, 15 Aug 2017 23:00:45 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Peter Jason wrote:
On Tue, 15 Aug 2017 11:58:29 -0400, Wolf K
wrote:

On 2017-08-15 10:37, Paul wrote:
Wolf K wrote:
On 2017-08-14 23:11, Peter Jason wrote:
On Mon, 14 Aug 2017 22:47:07 -0400, Wolf K
wrote:

On 2017-08-14 19:31, Peter Jason wrote:
[...]
My hardware is 10year old and works OK.

My booting problem such as you describe was caused by the BIOS battery
terminals being tarnished over time and needed a good clean. The
little battery needs its surface polished too.
That's a sign of the battery is dying: at full voltage, the current can
cut through a fair amount of dirt and oxidation.
My old one is working fine after the good clean.
Of course, because you've reduced the surface resistance considerably.
But you'll have to clean it again fairly soon. If I were you I'd make
sure I knew what battery to get when a good clean doesn't work any more.

Good luck,

Surface resistance ?

The battery provides 0 to 10uA of current.
How much surface resistance do you need to drop 0.6V ?
Well, that's been my experience. Clean a button battery, it will work
for a while longer, the quit again. Sometimes a second cleanup will
work, too. But if a cleanup revitalsies the battery, I think it's on its
last legs.

[snip the usual technical and interesting :-) stuff. You really do go to
great lengths to educate us. Thanks.]

My car alarm key-chain gadget has two tiny 1616 disk batteries, and
these need a clean every so often because the alarm canceling function
becomes sluggish over time. They're in my pocket all the time.

The peak power (pulse) could be larger on a thing like that.
It is "high" power for short periods, so the average power
isn't that bad.

They even make key-fob flashlights that run on CRxxxx batteries,
and that wouldn't exactly be low current.

As for the cleaning bit, once you start cleaning, you'll be
cleaning forever. Until you replace one or both contact
surfaces in the thing that doesn't work properly.

Paul

I will be. The model is obsolete and came with the car. I have to
keep it going until the car is sold.

On Tue, 15 Aug 2017 12:47:40 -0400, "Jonathan N. Little"
wrote:

Paul wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Richmond wrote:
"Jonathan N. Little" writes:

Turning this crap off surely helps. OP did not say how much RAM he
had. Although 10 supposed to be "lighter" than 7 I have found 2GB
inadequate
especially on a budget CPU, 4GB better and 8GB the preferred amount,
(just my
experience).

I have an old 64 Bit Amd laptop with 1G of RAM. Originally with Vista. I
run 32 bit Windows 10 on it as it uses less RAM than 64 bit. It works OK
but a bit slow.


You must be a very patient guy ;-)


It will work with less memory.

I've run Win10 with the memory in a VM set to 256MB.

In the Preview releases of Windows 8 (before Windows 8 was
really finished), I could run that in 128MB. Later, 256MB
was a better fit.

In the Win10 case, I was still able to open Notepad
and edit a text document. I didn't try opening Firefox
or anything.
I didn't say it wouldn't work. I said it would be tortuously slow while
trying to do something. There has always be a very optimistic minimum
requirements which MS has listed for each version of Windows that in the
"real world" experience wasn't very practical.

I encountered many a bare-minimum OEM offerings for example with a weak
Celeron paired with 128 MB RAM on Windows XP that were real slugs. We
had a number of Gateways so configured at the library that luckily long
ago have been removed. I have a Compaq 110c 1GB RAM netbook that came
with cripple-ware Windows 7 Starter that only became useful when I
dumped Windows for Ubuntu.

Being skimpy on RAM especially with a weak CPU can have a dramatic
effect on performance. Your system will "run" with a old or budget CPU
with only 1GB of RAM, but really "run" may be too optimistic a word and
more like "walk" or "crawl" if you try to do any real work with it.

You have a strange idea of slow.
I have a desktop computer running Windows 10 Pro 32 bit with
1 gig of RAM and a dual core 1.6 Ghz Pentium.
it runs ordinary programs acceptably well.
I can stream youtube full screen with Firefox for example.

On Tue, 15 Aug 2017 11:26:01 -0400, "Jonathan N. Little"
wrote:

Richmond wrote:
"Jonathan N. Little" writes:

Turning this crap off surely helps. OP did not say how much RAM he
had. Although 10 supposed to be "lighter" than 7 I have found 2GB inadequate
especially on a budget CPU, 4GB better and 8GB the preferred amount, (just my
experience).

I have an old 64 Bit Amd laptop with 1G of RAM. Originally with Vista. I
run 32 bit Windows 10 on it as it uses less RAM than 64 bit. It works OK
but a bit slow.


You must be a very patient guy ;-)

I had a PC running XP with 96 MB RAM.

VanguardLH wrote:

Darklight wrote:

I have a amd x2 6400

That's the CPU.

on an asus m2n-sli deluxe motherboard,

That's the motherboard.

with a nviida 9500gt

That's the nVidia GeForce 9500 GT.

Alas, you only give the reference graphics card design model. Do you
actually have a video card labelled "nVidia" as the manufacturer or OEM
brand? Same reference model can be implemented different ways by
different card makers. Check if you have the Windows 10 driver (which
must be the same bitwidth as the OS and which you did not mention) for
THAT brand and model of video card.
Nvidia driver from nvidia download site
gpu palit 9500gt super+1GB

You could try using the reference driver for your video card and hope it
supports all features on whatever brand and model of video card that you
have. Have you visited their site to check you have the latest driver?

https://www.geforce.com/drivers

The one I found there (https://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/120908)
does NOT list Windows 10 as supported. You might get lucky, might not.
The 9500 GT was the bottom half of that product line aka a entry-level
product. Quite often with video cards, the top half of a product model
line overlaps (is equal to) the bottom half on the next model line.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...9xxx.29_series

running two monitors. This pc runs
win 7 without problems. I installed win 10 on it and it
took along time to shut down, when i switch it on the
pc fails to post.

Are you testing with still 2 monitors connected or just 1?
i tested with one screen and both screens result was the same.

I have to switch off the power supply and on again then i
am able to boot up the pc.

Have you tried with all externally connected devices, including USB
(except keyboard and mouse if those use USB) disconnected?
i only have usb mouse and ps/2 keyboard. no other device connected.

So i went into power options and disabled everything, this
help in the shut down time, but booting up was still
problematic.

Does the computer actually fail to get to the POST screen?
if fails to get to boot/post screen
Or is it
*after* Windows 10 starts loading that "fails" (which doesn't say if the
computer won't power up or hangs during OS load)? You may have to
disable a POST banner some motherboards like to show during a boot.
That obliterates you from seeing the POST screen and instead shows you
their adware banner and perhaps some status during boot.

Andy Burns wrote:

VanguardLH wrote:

Does the computer actually fail to get to the POST screen?

For "fast startup" mode (aka hybrid boot) the machine isn't actually
booting, it's recovering from a hibernate which happened at "shutdown"
... hence bypassing POST.

If you read my post properly i disabled all that.

Andy Burns wrote:

VanguardLH wrote:

Wouldn't "went into power options and disabled everything" mean hybrid
hibernate was disabled?

It would if the O/P went deep enough into the settings, but s/he hasn't
been back, so I suspect we'll never know ...
I disabled everything. i disabled one at a time restarting after each
disable

Good Guy wrote:

On 14/08/2017 11:06, Darklight wrote:
I have a amd x2 6400 on an asus m2n-sli deluxe motherboard,
with a nviida 9500gt running two monitors. This pc runs
win 7 without problems. I installed win 10 on it and it
took along time to shut down, when i switch it on the
pc fails to post.

I have to switch off the power supply and on again then i
am able to boot up the pc.

So i went into power options and disabled everything, this
help in the shut down time, but booting up was still
problematic.

So what i am asking did or does any one else have a problem
similar to this and if so what did you do to correct it.

I have one of the machines DELL 760 much older machine than yours and
what I normally do is to let Windows decide how it wants to deal with
various old drivers and other hardware. Windows like to do its own work
in the background and in time everything starts working as normal as
possible.

Switching off the machine is not the best way to deal with problems.
Always allow windows to work out how each drivers have to be dealt
with. You could also check that fast start-up is set to be on so that
Windows knows how to save your settings before switching off.

I allowed windows to do its thing without interruption from me.

Paul wrote:

Darklight wrote:
I have a amd x2 6400 on an asus m2n-sli deluxe motherboard,
with a nviida 9500gt running two monitors. This pc runs
win 7 without problems. I installed win 10 on it and it
took along time to shut down, when i switch it on the
pc fails to post.

I have to switch off the power supply and on again then i
am able to boot up the pc.

So i went into power options and disabled everything, this
help in the shut down time, but booting up was still
problematic.

So what i am asking did or does any one else have a problem
similar to this and if so what did you do to correct it.

I think the suggestion from Andy, is probably it.

*******

1) It's quite possible there isn't a Win10 driver for your
video card. In my case, this machine has no driver, the other
machine got one driver before Win10 support was cut off.

The driver i installed was from here
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/download/dri...x/112662/en-uk
And as you can see my gpu is supported.


If a video card doesn't have support, the Device Manager
driver will say "Microsoft Basic Display Driver" and
the max resolution will be 1024x768.

Nothing to do with your problem, but I thought I'd toss that in.
Correcting the problem (new video card), costs money. I don't
plan on giving them the satisfaction.

2) Win10 is very wasteful of cycles, and more-so when connected
to the network. It rails my poor laptop half the time, when
connected to the network. The machine actually becomes usable
if the network cable is disconnected. The battery lasts twice as
long under Win10, with the network cable disconnected. The
battery actually lasts longer than Win7 (with network cable
connected).

3) Since Windows 10 is prefaced as "software as a service",
it has to give the impression it's constantly giving you
a shoe shine. Yes, your shoes look nice, but it's awful
expensive to shine them over and over again.

At startup, msmpeng (Windows Defender) will scan the System
folder for malware. That can account for a small delay. Third party
AVs do this too, so it's a tradition, not a bug.

There is some sort of Content Management activity. It involves
figuring out whether to show you advertising, whether to
put up a different background image and so on. Purely unrelated
to the user at all of course. It doesn't help you get your work
done.

Windows Update is supposed to be delayed, and USOSVC may be the
trigger that kicks it off. You will then see activity for quite
a while, *after* the desktop appears. While this is a drag on the
computer, it doesn't affect boot time. In some cases, there may be
enough time to start an install downloaded from
catalog.update.microsoft.com, before the built-in Windows Update
activity starts.

*******

In this article, on the lower part of the page, is a registry entry
to turn on status messages for services. If a service was stalled
at shutdown, the name might stay on the screen.


https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/3247...rtup-problems/

The computer has several shutdown options.

S3 Sleep - regular (to RAM)
- hybrid sleep (hiberfile has the entire session written to
disk)
This takes time at shutdown. If the power goes off, the RAM
copy of the OS is lost, but the hiberfile copy can be read at
restart. If power stays available, the RAM copy of the OS is
used.

S4 Hibernate - hiberfile has the entire session written to disk.
This takes time at shutdown.

S5 Soft Off - On my laptop, the power LED goes off, yet the hard drive
LED continues to pulse. This could be Fast Start
hibernating just the kernel. Whereas Hibernate writes out
the whole RAM, kernel hibernation for Fast Start might only
write out 256MB.

There are ways to trace what happens at bootup.

Back in the WinXP era, there was BootVis. It was the best, in
terms of doing things that were useful to end users. This was
discontinued before WinXP SP3 timeframe.

It came back, as XbootMgr and XPerf viewer. These allow plotting
the computing activity during bootup or during shutdown. The
ETW subsystem records events. It's running all the time. You
can even use events from that subsystem, to debug or "watch"
what programs are doing. Process Monitor uses those events.

XBootMgr and XPerf were still around in the Win8 era. Then,
Microsoft decided a more grandiose version was needed. They
made a tool called Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA). If left
to its own devices, it reboots the computer six times, and
the data collection takes two hours. There is a viewing tool
built in, and a number of canned graph formats (accessed by
twiddling triangle icons on the left column of the display).

So what I snagged, is the Win8 version, which may have been
the last one to have XBootMgr and friends.

Now, if you didn't like those options, Sysinternals Process Monitor
(ProcMon) has a boot monitoring option (it's a menu item). It collects
ETW data at boot, but it has no graphs. It just collects a
hundred megabytes of line by line text messages. The up-side,
is it's easy to use. It modifies the system, in that in inserts
"procmon23.sys" into the system folder, and that file is hidden.
It doesn't remove the file after the trace is collected. When you
start ProcMon after the system has booted (wait about two minutes
before opening it), what should happen, is it should offer to
"Save a file". And that file is the boot log.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...nloads/procmon

But scrolling through that trace, it's going to be hard to
identify what is wasting time. Virtually *everything* in
the log is a waste of time, and your job is to find the
biggest waste of time.

In a VM containing Win10 I run on this machine, I've managed
to speed the VM up, by neutering a few subsystems. For example,
I renamed msmpeng.dll to msmpeng.dll.bak. So it wouldn't
have a Windows Defender. I turned off the ContentAnalysis
service (hiding in a BackgroundTaskHost or similar), by
renaming a couple critical DLLs it uses. I was careful to
not get too ambitious. I didn't stick a fork into Cortana,
although I was tempted. And the CPU usage dropped to the
point, I could actually do work in the VM. Of course, that
sort of butchery is "not maintainable". I'd no longer
be getting Windows Update (I disabled wuaneng.dll), I'd
not get security updates, blah blah blah. So that was
purely an example of removing some of the overhead, to
see if the thing could be made usable. And it did help.
This is not something I would recommend for a "daily driver"
OS, and would be something intended for your batch work or
something. Like if you leave a video render running all night,
maybe an OS disk drive with the nuts cut off, would be a useful
thing. Boot the neutered drive, set it running, then switch
disks in the morning to the (maintainable) daily driver OS.

While you can debug it, the tools aren't really that good.
One of the shortcomings, is XbootMgr or WPA will record that
"SVCHOST pid 912 was doing stuff". And of course, you don't
have a log of what services run in that one, so you cannot
begin to guess what service was doing it. Like on a Linux box,
the PID value will be different on each boot, so you cannot
even analyze the system before rebooting, to figure out what
PID 912 is. It might be PID 546 the next time. If the SVCHOST
envelope could be removed, the system would be a lot easier
to debug. For example, when wuaueng rails a CPU core for an
hour, people would like to see that thing named and shamed
in Task Manager. As a start. We shouldn't have to use
Process Explorer to figure it out.

Paul

Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Paul wrote:
Darklight wrote:
I have a amd x2 6400 on an asus m2n-sli deluxe motherboard,
with a nviida 9500gt running two monitors. This pc runs win 7 without
problems. I installed win 10 on it and it took along time to shut
down, when i switch it on the
pc fails to post.
I have to switch off the power supply and on again then i am able to
boot up the pc.
So i went into power options and disabled everything, this help in the
shut down time, but booting up was still problematic.
So what i am asking did or does any one else have a problem
similar to this and if so what did you do to correct it.

I think the suggestion from Andy, is probably it.

*******

1) It's quite possible there isn't a Win10 driver for your
video card. In my case, this machine has no driver, the other
machine got one driver before Win10 support was cut off.

If a video card doesn't have support, the Device Manager
driver will say "Microsoft Basic Display Driver" and
the max resolution will be 1024x768.

Nothing to do with your problem, but I thought I'd toss that in.
Correcting the problem (new video card), costs money. I don't
plan on giving them the satisfaction.

His video card is supported

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/87988/


2) Win10 is very wasteful of cycles, and more-so when connected
to the network. It rails my poor laptop half the time, when
connected to the network. The machine actually becomes usable
if the network cable is disconnected. The battery lasts twice as
long under Win10, with the network cable disconnected. The
battery actually lasts longer than Win7 (with network cable
connected).

It's a chatty little bugger ain't it...


3) Since Windows 10 is prefaced as "software as a service",
it has to give the impression it's constantly giving you
a shoe shine. Yes, your shoes look nice, but it's awful
expensive to shine them over and over again.

At startup, msmpeng (Windows Defender) will scan the System
folder for malware. That can account for a small delay. Third party
AVs do this too, so it's a tradition, not a bug.

There is some sort of Content Management activity. It involves
figuring out whether to show you advertising, whether to
put up a different background image and so on. Purely unrelated
to the user at all of course. It doesn't help you get your work
done.

Turning this crap off surely helps. OP did not say how much RAM he had.
Although 10 supposed to be "lighter" than 7 I have found 2GB inadequate
especially on a budget CPU, 4GB better and 8GB the preferred amount,
(just my experience).

4gb or ram was installed. while win10 was running 3gb was available
Which was reported by advance system care.

Andy Burns wrote:

Darklight wrote:

So i went into power options and disabled everything

including disabling hybrid boot? i.e. set the opposite to this article


http://lifehacker.com/enable-this-setting-to-make-windows-10-boot-up-faster-1743697169
Thank all for your input. When i get this pc back i will look further into
it. The pc in question is only a test pc for a friend who is used to
laptops and has never owned a pc before, and who also wants to have a dual
monitor display. it's just to give him a taste of what it's like.

Thanks again.

Darklight wrote:

Does the computer actually fail to get to the POST screen?

if fails to get to boot/post screen

Then it is not a problem with the OS. The OS hasn't loaded yet.

PSUs get more limp as they get older. Capacity wanes over time. Could
be it cannot provide the load put upon it. Do you have more than one
drive attached? If so, try booting up with only the OS drive connected
to power.

In the 10 years that you've had that computer, have you yet replaced the
CMOS battery? Those are lucky to reliably last 5 years in use.