Time for a change.

[PlaneMan]

My little Dell 3050 has been getting slower and slower by the week.

Tried watching the Cardiff Blues V Saracens on 4OD earlier and it was winding me up something rotten. Lots of dropped frames and stalls. Even Netflix and YouTube, which normally work fine, are having issues.

I suspected the bloat of Windows 10 so tried  the latest Mint, after an hour or so the same issues returned. Fresh install of Win 10, same thing.

I can’t be doing with fecking about with it so I’m currently looking at calling in Christmas money a bit early to go towards this.

Chrome OS with Android support is my favourite laptop OS by far, can’t see why this won’t do the same for my media duties.

I’ve looked at NUC and the like with Linux but there is little, if any, savings to be had.

Any other thoughts? Please, no Windoze.

My aim with the Dell is to do another clean install and pass it on to a special needs school that my mate works at, if it’s any use to them.

[Jukebox]

IIRC most Dell PCs have built in diagnostics accessed by pressing F8 (I think, or maybe F11 or F12) during bootup. Worth running if you haven’t done so already.

[keith with the teef]

Do you install drivers when you did a fresh 10?

[PlaneMan]

Keith, yes, drivers were done. Had the latest on a flash drive.

Juke, wasn’t aware of that, I’ll try later or tomorrow. Thanks.

[Dave Rice]

If it has a spinner I’d suspect that. Look in Task Manager and see if the HDD is being thrashed a lot. If it is you know what to do – SSD time ?

[Jukebox]

Jukebox wrote:

IIRC most Dell PCs have built in diagnostics accessed by pressing F8 (I think, or maybe F11 or F12) during bootup. Worth running if you haven’t done so already.

I’ve checked a 4 year old Dell laptop which I haven’t used for a while and on that it’s F12. (Boot options)

[PlaneMan]

Thanks Jukebox, running it now.

Dave, no spinner here, it’s a little netop job with a 32gb SSD.

[Richard]

The SSD is small, has it filled up and left very little workable space left? That could cause slow downs otherwise if it affecting such as broadcasts could transmission disturbances be the issue? The odd weather recently, that is odd from the point of radio transmission has caused a few breaks round here with some channels.

[PlaneMan]

There’s enough space on the SSD, no additional programs installed . Everything is done via Chrome so no interference . Thanks though  .

It’s running the extended memory checker having passed the basic check.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

As its the built in memory checker I assume it knows this but make sure the cache is disabled or you are just testing your CPU cache. I made that mistake with memtest 86 last year.

[PlaneMan]

All checks passed with flying colours so nothing wrong with it as such.

I suspect the rather weedy SOC is showing it’s age.

[blacklion1725]

I make you right – I found one of these little boxes and it struggled with a lot of stuff. Gave mine to a family member who uses it for Office tasks and general browsing  (with a usb drive added for storage) and it as right as rain for that – probably not much more than that though

[Dave Rice]

What CPU is it?

[PlaneMan]

It’s a Celery J1800

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Oh dear, I share your pain, horrid ?

My sister brought a PC without advice from me and has got one of those little beasties. Its really a pretty poor laptop CPU but soldered into a sort of desktop MoBo.

I thought I could at least give her a bit of a graphics boost because the board has a PCIe x16 slot and I have an HD5770 card spare, but no. The MoBo takes laptop style power from an external power brick and the only spare power connector is a single SATA.

Slow is the word here but it WILL play video, mostly.

[Dave Rice]

Yep, they’ve had their day. I’ve just had a laptop in with one, 8GB of ram and a spinner. Takes forever to boot but it’s only for a simple accounts spreadsheet so it’s been cleaned up and sent out again.

If you’re happy with Chrome o/s then that seems to be the way to go.

[PlaneMan]

Thanks all.

I’ll bag a chromebox later in the week probably.

[PlaneMan]

Ordered the i3 64GB/8GB Chromebox 3. CCL had it for £435 ,£475 odd on Amazon.

Due tomorrow. Be nice to be able to watch stuff without issues.

[PlaneMan]

It arrived not long ago and it’s updating now.

Very fast. The i7 version must fly.

I might even get around to using the included VESA mount but I doubt it. Everything just works including my mouse wich runs of  one of my keyboards USB ports, I was a little concerned about that.

 

[PlaneMan]

A few hours of use and I’m really happy. Premiere sports (for the Pro 14 Rugby) used to pixelate a fair bit and have dropouts, nothing tonight. Everything looks so ‘crisp’ and defined.

Youtube loads in no time at all, used to take maybe 30-45 seconds on the old Dell.

Money I didn’t want to spend but I’d have gone nuts still using the Dell.

[Author]

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