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Just replaced my Dell tower 4550 and would like to reconfigure it for my grandson. Anything would be better than nothing. I have the original discs. Do I need to do something first to clean the hard drive. I know a clean install would reconfigure the hard drive. Then since I have a kajillion updates, hot fixes, etc. etc. what do I do to upgrade all of that junk?
Which OS are you running and do you have a restore AND an OEM OS disk or do
only have one of them? Do you still have a restore partition on your hd? The updates
can be downloaded by service packs to a cd and save a lot of time restoring them.
Also, are you sure you need to go through all of that trouble? If you were selling it to a stranger then you definitely want to make sure and wipe it clean but since it's going to family it might save you a lot of time and effort to just uninstall programs he won't use, install new ones that he would, but otherwise leave it alone. That way all the upgrades, fixes, etc will all still be there.
It freezes up and acts like it has a virus. I have run several virus programs and it says it is clear. It is almost 7 years old and the computer people just laughed when I asked if it was worth fixing. It is soooooo slow.
Have you tried anything like running a disk scan, defragmenting, etc? It could be that there are some bad sectors on the hard drive that are causing problems, and if you run the disk scanning utility that may fix it (you didn't mention what version of Windows you're running, but all the ones I've used in the past had some sort of utility like that). Or it could just be that the computer's too old or doesn't have enough memory to handle running some of the programs you're trying to run...I had a computer that wasn't even that old and I got fed up with it because everything just ran so slowly on it. If you can afford it, you could get a low end new computer for him that would probably run a lot better than this one for just a few hundred dollars.
Probably will do that and recycle this thing with Best Buy. I just got a new macbook as you know from another thread. Bought very, very novice DH a Dell laptop for $500. He is happy. We are retired so $500 doesn't just fall out of the sky also had to replace the dishwasher this week. Guess we didn't HAVE TO but luxuries have become necessities.
This child has a lot of our money in his corner. He may have to wait a while.
The basic specs (google dell 4550) call for 256 meg of ram. Running almost any
program under XP or Vista would cause the pc to stall or, at best, run very slowly.
If you stripped almost everything out except for a browser and an antivirus, it would
probably run fast enough for basic internet use. I had 2 gig in my E521 and it would
lock up while scrolling 3 meg picture files.
It can be difficult and expensive to make serious upgrades to marginal pc's. You soon
hit the point of diminishing returns rather quickly. There are some very good basic
pc's available for $600 or so, especially in the WM's or other bargain stores.
