First lappy to play with...

[Zaxx]

Needless to say I've never cared for lappys much but I just had a old Tosh Satellite with a T5500 C2D 1.66GHz, 2 gigs of ram and a 160gb hitachi drive given to me...all it needs is a $75 replacement screen. Atm I have it connected to an old 19" lcd. I noticed that the hdd activity light never seems to go off and it can only do 25MB/s seq reads and writes...isn't that a bit slow even for a 5 year old 2.5 5400rpm drive?

[Hameister]

I never bothered to benchmark a 5,400 rpm HDD in a notebook, so I can't say what read/write throughput you should be getting. But they are slooooow for sure.

As far as the HDD activity LED is concerned it's probably endlessly indexing. I'm guessing it's using Vista Home Premium?

Drop in even the cheapest SSD you can find, and you'll be amazed at the increased performance.

[Zaxx]

lol...first thing I did was to kill indexing...it's running XP SP3 MCE btw. Then I went thru and killed any useless services and startups. System was also much faster/responsive when I'd exit kaspersky IS...so I ditched it and installed a Norton IS 2012 90 day trial...muuuch better now. I guess I can get unlazy and google the hdd model number and see if I can find some specs. Once my main rig is back to good, I'm gonna toss in my old Apex 60 (220R/110W) which should make a world of difference I'm sure. If I'm as satisfied as I think I'll be then I'll cough up the $70 for a new screen. I'm hesitant to try running Win7...even if I get another 2gb of ram, I'm not too sure how the 1.66GHz T5500 will cope.

[Hameister]

Just be careful not to dump too much into that old laptop. For $350.00 today, you can get a brandy new notebook with a much larger, faster, HDD, more memory, faster cpu, etc.

Also, I think you'll find if you clean out Norton, and install either Microsoft Security Essentials Anti-Virus, or Avast Anti-Virus, (both are free), you have a better experience, with less bloat and slowdown.

[Sean]

From my experience, Windows 7 runs quite well so long as the CPU is at least dual core and has 2GB or more RAM. For example, I had a lend of a Netbook with a Dual Core Atom 1.6GHz, which is less powerful than that Core 2 Duo and it was surprisingly responsive with Windows 7 despite also running on a 5400RPM HDD.

Another thing to think about is what other use you could give for it instead of forking out on a screen and possibly even a replacement battery. For example, you could place it under your living room TV, hook it up and attach a wireless keyboard/mouse, which would make a good Web TV box especially since it's got the XP MCE edition on it. You can also attach USB HDDs to it to share over the network, doubling up as a NAS. Being a laptop, it wouldn't take up as much space or use as much electricity as a home theatre PC either and that processor should be quick enough to place most HD formats.

[Zaxx]

Damn good idea Sean! I'm sitting here bitchin' about a lot of my fav tv shows are no longer released as xvid...it's mp4 now and my trusty old $40 walmart dvd player (with a usb port!) can't do any video except VCDs, SVCDs and xvid (divx). Was gonna break down and get a proper media player for ~$100 but this sounds a world better. Once I get it set up I'm sure I can figure out where the 'lid closed' switch is in the lappy and rig it to 'always open' so I can shut it. My recently decommissioned rig (destined to become a home server one day) has a WiFi AP mobo (C2D Wolfy/P35 Asus P5K-E WiFi w/6GB of ram), I just need to throw an old psu and boot drive in and dust off my trusty old 2600XT backup gfx card. My home network is all wired (Gbit with cat5) in case u haven't guessed. ATM I'm dealing with a mobo headache, had a Z68-UD4 with bad memory slot(s)...waiting for the replacement which I decided will be going towards the wifey's next upgrade, my new Asus P8Z68V Pro just arrived today.

[Zaxx]

Just had a look at the Fujitsu 160gb drive smart. It's got 24,400 hours on the clock and aida64 smart reading shows a yellow warning triangle next to CB - Run Out Cancel. Don't know much about it except that it's to do with ECC...is that an indication that the drive is pretty much worn out?

[Sean]

This attribute meant it had an invalid checksum, which probably happened while writing a sector and lost power (e.g. flat battery), so I wouldn't worry about it. The main figures to watch out for are the ones highlighted in red in this Wiki page, especially the "Reallocated Sectors Count".

For the closed screen, have a look at the power options in the control panel. Pretty much all laptops give a "Close the lid" dropdown here, in which case you choose "Do nothing". Many business laptop users do this, so when they return to the office, they simply plug in the monitor and USB hub (with printer, keyboard, mouse, etc. all attached), then power on, close the screen and use it like a desktop.

[ChristopherRyan]

Most 5400RPM 2.5" HDDs from 4 - 6 years ago max out around 40MB/s read/write under the best of circumstances. Random performance is... well, terrible all the time.

The last couple laptops I've purchased were obtained from Ebay, and I got some bitchin' deals. Basically, I'm not buying a new one until they start putting decent displays in them.

[Zaxx]

Thanx for the tips fellas...and sure enuff I can config the lid to 'do nothing' when closed...pretty easy to spot a lappy noob eh??