10 on a Netbook? SUCCESS!

Old fart said:

HiCould you give a quick rundown on how to disable the windows 10 stuff, got windows 10 running on a aspire one notebook, intel atom n550 (1.5ghz, 1mb l2 cache) 1gb ddr memory, 250gb hdd I say running but so slow, think Royal Mail might be quicker lolCheers Pat

Sounds like you didn't install all the drivers, you just left what Windows found automatically. If you install the latest Intel graphics driver you should have some more hardware acceleration and improve speed. Probably this is a Windows Vista or 7 driver, use Aida64 to find out. If the graphics card is not detected properly, Windows 10 install the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter (no hardware acceleration, software only) and this makes the netbook look 2-3 times slower than it really is! If possible increase RAM to at least 2GB and it will make huge difference.

Hi
Have increased ram but having trouble using the program you suggested so have deleted-the ram has improved things, have also deleted most of the default windows 10 stuff, bing news, sports etc. & removed a couple of programs from the start-up menu.
Running much better
Cheers

Old fart said:

HiHave increased ram but having trouble using the program you suggested so have deleted-the ram has improved things, have also deleted most of the default windows 10 stuff, bing news, sports etc. & removed a couple of programs from the start-up menu.Running much better Cheers

Replace standard mechanic hard disk with an SSD and it will be blazing fast! In our shop a 120GB has about 40€, they are not too expensive as they used to be.

Resurrecting a dead thread, because I just resurrected an old NC10.

First, the 2021 build of 32-bit Windows 10 runs REALLY well on my old Samsung NC10 netbook, I've got an upgraded NC10 which is now IDLING at down at 6%-9% CPU usage!

Yes, upgraded NC10, BUT it costs less to do the upgrade than it costs to recycle a TV.

FIRST
Bad news - to get the NC10 it to run well, you will NEED a SSD drive

Good news - the 'basic' installation of 32 Bit Win10 only takes up 21 GB. So you can use a $20-$25 120 GB SSD and still have plenty of room.

Post script - you will need to go to the Samsung website to download and re-install "Easy Display Manager" and "Easy Keyboard Manager" to re-enable the hotkeys for WiFi, volume, and MOST importantly screen brightness.

SECOND
Bad news- you'll really need to update the memory.

Good news, the 2GB memory chip is about $25.

THIRD- and most important - THERE IS A SIMPLE FIX FOR THE NC10 'WHITE SCREEN'
Bad news - the NC10 fan collects dust, and over time the thermal paste between the metal fan housing and the CPU & GPU breaks down. I suspect this was causing their temperatures to spike, adding to the 'white screen' problem for the GPU AND to the 'running painfully slow' problem due to CPU thermal throttling.

Good news- In my situation, all I needed to dramatically improve (not totally fix) the 'white screen' was screwdriver, Q-tips, silicone oil, and some thermal paste.
Remove the battery & screws from the back case.
Carefully pry open the case.
Remove and clean the dust off the interior of the backshell with a Q-tip.
Unscrew the fan assembly, the fan pull right out, use a Q-tip to clean the blades and metal duct.
Clean the old thermal paste off the CPU and GPU.
Use a Q-tip to dab a drop of silicone oil/sewing machine oil onto the fan shaft, and onto the motor hole, pop fan back in.
Dab thermal paste onto the CPU & GPU, replace the metal duct and screw down.
Replace the backshell and screws.

RESULT?
My results have been that a NC10 which had been almost unusable because of the 'white screen failure'.
The NC10 has 8 levels of brightness, mine would go white unless it was at level 1 or 2 (meaning you could only use it with an external monitor or in a dim room).
After cleaning the fan and refreshing the thermal paste, it is running stable at brightness settings 1-6. There is still some 'finicky' experience with screen tilt and brightness, but suddenly it's usable again. Even outside.

Brilliant! I find it runs well on most netbooks but yes you do need an ssd and 2gb ram.

Biggest issue for slow down of performance is One Drive IMO. I always uninstall that and it makes a huge difference.

Also - turn off transparency. And go to background apps and turn off all but the most essential- they will then only start up of used instead of running in the background.

Hazel123 said:

Also - turn off transparency.
And go to background apps and turn off all but the most essential- they will then only start up of used instead of running in the background.

Agreed- there are a few more tweaks

- Switch to Dark Mode to save power / reduce white screen. Settings-Personalization-Colors,. Also set browsers to 'dark theme'

- You can use a low-profile micro-SD card adapter which doesn't stick out, and 128 GB / 256 GB micro sd cards are cheap, so it's reasonably easy to add a 2nd 'drive' for documents AND to enable automatic backups.

- Here's a quick way to stop unneeded apps and background processes. Hit the WIN key, type 'task' and select 'run task manager as administrator'. Go to processes, and stop all the updates and unneeded processes - adobe updates, chrome, phone, x-box etc.

-There's a GPU over-clocker/un-throttler 'GMA Booster" which I found was is very good at smoothing out video.

spapakons said:

PS: At this same laptop I could also successfully install Ubuntu 32-bit and MacOS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (with much difficulty following a long guide). So Windows 10 32-bit should install very easy and be the best OS for such systems. Do it, don't hesitate, you'll thank me later.

Good point- When earlier builds of Win10 were slow, I switch the NC10 to a chromium clone "CloudReady" which ran well, BUT those developers are now focusing on 64-bit OS development, and no longer update the 32-bit version.

With the newest Win10 builds, the OS and browsers run much faster.
One OTHER trick I found - if you can get a "microsoft app" version of a program, e.g. a YouTube clone, they tend to run VERY light on system resources.

Hi there
For typical consumer grade uses (e.g email, e-commerce, online banking, office type documents etc)Windows doesn't require a huge amount of CPU - I've often said that over years of fiddling around with computers on all sorts of OS's (from IBM mainframes to modern tablets) assuming there's sufficient RAM and not an overcommitted workload then the biggest bottleneck to computer performance is poor I/O subsystems. If you can replace an old (probably incredibly poor, slow and has a tiny cache ) laptop spinner with an SSD the performance improvement will immediately become obvious. Even 1 GB RAM can work with W10 - especially the 32 bit version provided you aren't into extreme gaming etc etc -- and who would on a netbook anyway !!!!. Use Firefox as the browser instead of edge / chrome or even use OPERA.

I wouldn't try running photoshop or video editing apps on this type of device either or any sort of video streaming. You might find also that playing Video with things like VLC won't be very good -- especially if it's a 4K UKD video in H.265 format -- that CPU will struggle there to give you any sensible response at all.

You can't compare these old netbooks / laptops with modern mobile phones which often have very powerful multi processor e,g snapdagon and work on ARM technology so video on those things is never usually a problem (apart from small screen sizes !!).

Using Micro SD cards for auxiliary storage is an OK idea but remember their I/O rates are even slower than old PC spinners.


Any sort of Linux should run easily on these devices - it's built differently to windows, the kernel is much more modular and if you use a GUI there are several "minimalist" GUI's around to limit the consumption of resources.

Cheers
jimbo