What hardware are you using?

[crosscourt]

My wifes laptop is the only one I have Windows 7 installed on, but wont be going to Windows 10, despise it.

New version of Calculate just came out.

[tlmiller]

Yup, that's what made me think of trying it.

[crosscourt]

Im cloning hard drives with Windows 7 for my business use. The great thing about using these Optiplex 7010s is all the different form factors all have the same bios and mobos so I can take a Win 7 drive cloned on one of them and use it on any one of those systems at any time. Linux is easy as any drive I have it installed on can be placed in any system for use.
Ive been using the free EaseUS Todo backup 10.6 nice app.

[crosscourt]

One clone works great but the other clone seems to have some issues and runs far slower than the other drive, almost to a snails pace on scans with certain apps. Will have to check the drive but it didnt even want to reboot to do an error check, so may be a bad drive.

[crosscourt]

Friend of mine just gave me a Compaq Presario CQ5700F with a athlon II 170U cpu 4gb of ram and a 500gb hard drive. It uses the integrated Radeon HD 3000 IGP that isnt bad for general use. The mobo is very basic with no pcie 4x or 16x slots only 2 1x slots. The system sold for about $300 new so Im going to play with it a bit and see what I can do to perk this system given the limited PSU.

Maybe an Athlon X3 or X4 and will look into a slightly better 1x video card just in case I need it. Im running MX17 on it right now which is running great.

[crosscourt]

Given the cheap heatsink and average power supply went with an Athlon II X2 3.4ghz which uses 65w versus the 170u at 22w. 170u is a bit slow on videos and streaming so the X2 3.4ghz should perk that quite a bit without spending much as they are $10 online. Went to 4gb of ram and went with a newer hard drive running MX17 but compared other distros like Q4OS but they werent any faster than MX17.

[tlmiller]

If I could have found it, I would have looked for a Phenom 9100E. Same 65w TDP as the X2, but it's a quad core.

Yeah, not a HUGE difference in the grand scheme of things, but I'd rather those 2 cores vs. the several hundred MHz of the II x2, personally.

However, either way, huge improvement on the original chip.

I'm personally second guessing switching to the E6420, I really dislike the touchpad. The keyboard had a few issues that were taken care of with cleaning, but the touchpad, while it works, is NOT very precise. I have tried both synaptics and libinput, and libinput is (surprisingly) superior, but still not perfect. So thinking about staying with the T430 after all, despite the much superior battey on here and the ability to upgrade to 802.11AC. Not 100% yet. I'll make my mind up by Monday when I have to take 1 of them back to work!!

[crosscourt]

The motherboard on this Compaq is a joke and i just spotted a mobo with Phenom 3.2ghz for cheap with pci express 16x slots and better feature set.
Always limited by the terrible bios options with Compaq systems(otherwise the 65w Phenom would be a great choice). Might do that instead as I can get both for the price of the cpu. Im not going to put a lot of cash into this older system, just want to get it to a point where it can surf, run videos and stream online without slowdowns.

In my case Im not very picky with touchpads but much prefer Dell over other options.

[tlmiller]

Generally I agree on touchpads, I also rememeber the Exx20 & Exx30 series took a LONG time to get working correctly in linux. They would "twitch" for YEARS. My fathers works fine (E65{2 or 3}0), but maybe it's his is a 30 and the 20's still don't work perfectly? Or this is just worn out and starting to die.

If you get the board & Phenom, that'll be a pretty decent system honestly. My buddy still uses a system I gave him with an Athlon II x4 645 8 GB ram 500 GB drive as his primary system. Might not be a gaming system, but still works just fine for basic computing tasks. Heck, with the PCI-E slots, you could even get it to be a MODERATE gaming system with an inexpensive modern video card!!

[crosscourt]

Agree the Phenom/mobo would be a decent gaming system and Ive got a better psu and a geforce 750 I could pop in it.

My only issue with the Phenom is 125w and having to use a better heatsink with possible noise issues. My present gaming system is really quiet given its performance.