Is reverting to Windows 7 worth it?

[selman]

Hi!

 

I recently bought a new gaming pc that completely outclasses my previous puny laptop. I use my new computer for most of my things in home, while I take the laptop to school, vacations etc. Hardware on the laptop is pretty sub-par, 4 gigs of RAM, i3 7th gen and it came with Windows 10 pre-installed.

 

It is pretty slow, however. I cannot use MS Office without it freezing for several minutes, it sometimes takes it 3-4 minutes to open Opera. I think those things should not take this much time, even in this hardware. I remember using desktops and laptops of similar hardware which run a lot smoother than that.

 

I tend to blame Windows 10 since I used "recovery" to install a fresh Windows 10 and it did not improve anything.

 

I am thinking of reverting to Windows 7. Is there a precedent that this would improve the performance?

[kerdios]

I use opera GX for vpn purposes when I'm not using my firefox on my win 7 4GB ram machine and it takes forever to do everything, you might want to try using Firefox instead and see if that changes things.

I think the only win OS that runs well with 4GB ram is winXP, but fat chance of you getting that to work nowadays.

I have no graphics card and the cpu is a 1st gen i5.

Firefox also starts slowly, but that's mostly because of the adblocker extension I'm using taking forever to load the filter list to the page file/virtual memory.

[rairii]

Linux. If you're going to change the OS on your system just swap to a Linux-based system, IMO.

If you're an absolute beginner to Linux I'd recommend looking in to getting Mint, XFCE or MATE version if you're very concerned about performance.

[BTGBullseye]

On 4/15/2021 at 3:09 PM, Annie said:

Linux. If you're going to change the OS on your system just swap to a Linux-based system, IMO.

If you're an absolute beginner to Linux I'd recommend looking in to getting Mint, XFCE or MATE version if you're very concerned about performance.

Mint is my recommendation for anyone that is used to Windows, especially someone wanting to revert to 7.

[selman]

On 4/16/2021 at 12:09 AM, Annie said:

Linux. If you're going to change the OS on your system just swap to a Linux-based system, IMO.

If you're an absolute beginner to Linux I'd recommend looking in to getting Mint, XFCE or MATE version if you're very concerned about performance.

I guess that helps. The day after this post I installed Lubuntu, which seems to work fine. I will definitely consider Mint though, offers some cool stuff. Thanks for the advice

[selman]

On 4/11/2021 at 9:59 PM, kerdios said:

I use opera GX for vpn purposes when I'm not using my firefox on my win 7 4GB ram machine and it takes forever to do everything, you might want to try using Firefox instead and see if that changes things.

I think the only win OS that runs well with 4GB ram is winXP, but fat chance of you getting that to work nowadays.

I have no graphics card and the cpu is a 1st gen i5.

Firefox also starts slowly, but that's mostly because of the adblocker extension I'm using taking forever to load the filter list to the page file/virtual memory.

Firefox was just as slow, sadly. Chrome worked a just a little bit better but it's just a massive oversight by the distributor, I think, to install Win10 on a hardware that was clearly designed for win7 at best. I installed Lubuntu, which is very lightweight and boots much faster with most programs (well, I only use it to browse web) run smoother.

 

Windows overall feels like a pain in the back with old hardware.

[kerdios]

5 hours ago, selman said:

Firefox was just as slow, sadly. Chrome worked a just a little bit better but it's just a massive oversight by the distributor, I think, to install Win10 on a hardware that was clearly designed for win7 at best. I installed Lubuntu, which is very lightweight and boots much faster with most programs (well, I only use it to browse web) run smoother.

 

Windows overall feels like a pain in the back with old hardware.

It's the only thing he can legally install (assuming he doesn't know about the license including a downgrading clause, which requires a lot more work)

[Alyxx Thorne]

Linux Mint is crazy fast, especially on older hardware. Highly recommended, and game support is pretty good nowadays too.

[SteelPony]

Linux is better if you only have 4GB of RAM. But, if you absolutely must use Windows 10, then you may try "increasing" its performance by disabling many of the telemetry stuff using this batch script https://gist.github.com/vip3rc0de/a0d2d90f52f9e7c90de0

 

Also this powershell script https://github.com/clong/MakeWindows10GreatAgain

 

Also turn off animations and "Fade" in Advanced System Settings > Advanced(Tab) > Performance Settings > Visual Effects. That always makes things feel snappier.

Edited May 31, 2021 by SteelPony
forgot to links properly (see edit history)

[FullBusinessSuit]

I'm on W7 still for my main computer, and I never connect my W10 computers to the internet or plug my main storage drives into them. I just realized that if I ever plugged my main storage drives into the W10 computers they could delete all my cracks and other memory editing programs because W10 won't let me permanently turn off the windows defender scanner. Does anyone here have a solution to this?

[BTGBullseye]

On 6/4/2021 at 12:08 AM, FullBusinessSuit said:

W10 won't let me permanently turn off the windows defender scanner. Does anyone here have a solution to this?

Yes. Install Avast, and then turn off Defender. It'll complain, but it'll work. Then just whitelist your stuff with Avast, and you're good.

[Im_CIA]

On 5/12/2023 at 9:33 AM, AlenBorsh said:

I see it's been a while, but I wanted to chime in. Understandably, you're frustrated with the slow performance of your laptop. While Windows 7 is a solid operating system, it's no longer supported by Microsoft, so you won't receive any security updates or patches. I suggest you update your system to Windows 10 or 11 which can be easily activated here SPAM_LINK Another option is to use lightweight programs such as Google Docs instead of MS Office, which can be resource-intensive. I hope that helps!

 

yeah bro. totally