Several months ago I converted my wife's XP machine to Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS. Then I stuck WPS office and some other apps on there for him. With the stock 500GB hard drive, boot times were on the order of an essentially unusable 5 minutes or more! I had a small 64GB SSD laying around, so I located the product key on the HD, swapped drives (getting inside laptops these days usually requires YouTube consultation), re-installed Win10, and voila!: a boot time of 12 seconds / shut-down time of 3 seconds, and no HP SW cruft. And replacing a bum hard drive or repairing the OS almost always means an OS re-install of one sort or another ( especially for Vista and Win7, which can develop unsolvable networking and startup issues).įor example, the very latest 'fix' I did was for my young nephew's first laptop, a low-end fairly new but asthmatic HP laptop with Win10 (home). Assembling the hardware means you also get to install the OS, and I've done so many, many times: DOS, Win286 (!), Win386, Win3.1, Win98, WinNT 4.0, WinXP, Vista, Win7, and now Win10. I've been building PCs since the 286 days, and have been doing informal tech support for family and friends (and making a very minor amount of cash here and there - it's not a paid gig I actively pursue) ever since.

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