I have a Fujitsu desktop computer that was absolutely fine running windows 7 but since updating to windows 10 it's gone extremely slow and getting worse. It's got a intel core i3-4160 chip and 4gb of ram. I've been told that if I double the ram to 8gb it will sort the problem. Am I wasting my time and money with the extra ram and do I need a new computer?
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eLuSiVeMiTe
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Ram certainly would help. I'd consider 8bg to be the minimum.
An SSD for running windows on will also see good returns.
And you can probably pick up a cheap upgrade CPU for your current socket.
Though first I'd stick ram in and pop a fresh install of Windows on it. Windows gets bloated
Kayos
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I'd see if memory helps, will be ddr3 with that generation processor
I wouldn't invest more though, it's likely end of life for usefulness as a general purpose pc
www.intel.co.uk
I wouldn't invest more though, it's likely end of life for usefulness as a general purpose pc
Intel® Core™ i3-4160 Processor (3M Cache, 3.60 GHz) - Product Specifications | Intel
Intel® Core™ i3-4160 Processor (3M Cache, 3.60 GHz) quick reference with specifications, features, and technologies.
www.intel.co.uk
I'm using a i5 Fuji laptop which ran great on Windows 7. I got the free Windows 10 upgrade and had all sorts of problems, ie. lost BT & internal modem. I went back to Windows 7 and all was fine again. I did double up on the the RAM [now 8GB]. Anyway, W7 support stopped so I bought a new version of Windows 10 with key from the bay [£15.99] and put a 500GB SSD in and have had no problems.
You could put a SSD in and the extra RAM will make a difference. Put Ccleaner on and clear out some of the junk. Uninstall some of the old programs you dont use and Ccleaner will delete some of the orphan reg keys and you may find it's a different PC.
You could put a SSD in and the extra RAM will make a difference. Put Ccleaner on and clear out some of the junk. Uninstall some of the old programs you dont use and Ccleaner will delete some of the orphan reg keys and you may find it's a different PC.
angellonewolf
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put the ram in it and do a fresh install of windows 10 if you dont need much space on the harddrive a 120gb are very cheap and even the 240 are fair price
eLuSiVeMiTe
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Because you've widened the bottleneck your CPU can actually do more work.
skotl
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Sounds good. In Task Manager, go to the Details tab and then click on the CPU column header to sort by most/least CPU - that will give you an idea of what's using the CPU.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was SearchIndexer, which uses quiet times to index your drive - perfectly normal if this is what is using CPU as, by design, it will quiet itself down if you start doing "real" work on the computer.
eLuSiVeMiTe
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Another issue iirc with the upgrade path is all the old files. Can free up about 12gb I think which it won't do by itself.
Need to start it off from the storage menu in the windows 10 specific settings page
sako243
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Can people please get it into their heads that unused RAM is wasted RAM. RAM is of the order 30x faster than fast SSDs so why would you not want to store stuff there.
To be fair I don't know how Windows reports its usage but on Linux you'll find two numbers - stuff actually in use and stuff that's been cached to speed things up. It's usually hovering about 90% usage all the time.
The kernel must be smart enough to release cached stuff quickly though when it's required. I'd be amazed if Windows didn't do that.
skotl
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Kind of.
You're right that most OS's use spare RAM for caching but Windows has done a decent job of reporting actual memory consumption for a while. This is from Windows 11 but the same applies (IIRC) to Windows 10:
Here the reported memory usage is just less than 50% at 7.6GB out of 16GB but the committed usage (including cache) is 11GB.
Running Windows 7 in 4GB is borderline and later versions (especially 64bit) really do need 8GB or more.
redlig
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Bought a new tower unit just before Xmas only to find that it won't communicate with a scanner/printer that I've had for 7 or 8 years .I should have seen that coming but as a non computer git .didn't. New unit on windows 11 old pc on 7. Canon say no longer covered. Does anyone know of a way round this please as I really don't want to bin a perfectly good printer . Any ideas?
slim_boy_fat
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I had exactly the same with my Epson 2440 scanner. I have to keep an old laptop running XP if I want to scan something, the scanner doesn't even have drivers for Win7 which I run on my d/top.
angellonewolf
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I've had this before and to get round it go to the driver page of your printer down load the drivers for windows 8 and windows 7 and even nt
When it asked for the drivers manual point it to the file and let it install through that rather then let windows do it on its own you might find you have to try all drivers before it finds one that works
I've even had it I've had to install 2 drivers before it worked
Does not always work but worth a try
