Have you every used Win10 on a machine with an old-style hard disk? Is it usable?
I just swapped out a SSD for a 6yr old (new) 1TB 2.5’ laptop HD, and Win10 was effectively unusable. I was surprised: I hadn’t heard that a SSD (Solid State Disk. SATA or M2) was a requirement.
You may be suffering a deficit of RAM. Your old SSD was fine with swapping memory to a page file, but a HD is going to be shyte at it.
Any chance you could upgrade to a minimum of 8 gig? 16 would be much better.
My three year old laptop came with a 1TB HDD, and while it probably won’t handle climate projections it’s certainly usable (takes approximately 1.5 minutes from cold start to login).
I have two desktops at home and a desktop at work, all of which have old-style mechanical drives. All three run Windows 10 just fine. The one at work is running 3 virtual machines as well as the software on the host.
A solid state disk isn’t a requirement.
On that theory I’m going to upgrade from 8 to 16 at the same time I get the new 1TB SSD.
In the mean time, I’ve put the 128GB SSD back in.
It wasn’t the 15 minutes starting that really hurt – it was the 30-360 seconds after clicking, before an application splash screen would appear to confirm your click.
I run Win10 with a mechanical hard drive on a computer that technically doesn’t support it. No problems at all. It might be a tad slower than my SDD at work, but I don’t really notice any difference.
I suspect the issue is more likely lack of memory.
I assume you have your reasons, but why not just run the OS off the SSD and use the HDD just for storage?
Is it just because the laptop came with the OS preinstalled on the HDD?
Yes, until late last year. However:
An SSD is faster (for running Windows).
You should use more than one hard drive.
The supported method of installing windows has Program Files on the same drive as the OS, and anyway, since I’d like to please my wife, I don’t particularly want Program Files on a slow disk.
I could cut the size of everything right back by starting afresh, and only installing as she notices what is missing, but I don’t want to do that to my wife. I’d rather just leave all the installed programs, and Windows, and move to a larger disk.
Windows is currently taking 30GB (I think the accumulated patches take a lot of space), and program files 32 and 64 are taking 30GB each, and there’s another 20GB of garbage that random programs put in the unmovable sections of the user profile, and so I’d rather just spend $100 and get something larger than 128GB.
And if you think that’s bad, you should see the garbage that games put in the roaming profile on the child’s PC. A 50GB roaming profile. I can only guess that they have no idea what they are doing, and don’t expect their games to be installed on corporate PC’s. The child’s PC is not a corporate PC, and we aren’t using roaming, so it doesn’t matter, but it still makes me gag.
(Note for random readers: the roaming profile is in the nature of a local cache, and it’s supposed to be on a fast drive, and it can not /should not be moved from the OS drive since it has to be in the same defined location on every corporate computer. It gets downloaded from the network every time you log into a new computer, and updated on the network when you log out. 50GB!
I have an older desktop PC with an old school HDD. When I upgraded to WIN10 from WIN7 a few years ago it seemed awfully slow, so I upgraded from 8MB of RAM to 16MB. It did help a lot. My computer is still slower than I’d like, but useable. I think my next step is just buying a new PC.
I’m amazed you got it working with 16MB of memory!! Just think how fast it would be with a few gigs in there.
My Windows 10 gaming machine was fine with about 10TB of spinning platters and 16GB RAM. I say “was” because about 6 months ago something killed my hard drive performance. I suspect a Windows update, but I haven’t found the solution yet.
I could also just get an SSD I suppose, but what I really need is a new PC, so I’m not going to throw any more money at this old one. My graphics card is so obsolete Nvidia doesn’t even update the drivers anymore. I’ve been holding off on buying a new one because of the video card shortage causing high prices, but I should probably just bite the bullet and pull the trigger (to torture a somewhat violent metaphor).
Win10 used to run fine with a spinning disk. One of the major updates killed HDD performance. If I remember correctly, it was somewhere around the 1803 or 1809 updates.
This was the reason I went back to Windows 7. It was after the second update or so that Windows 10 got unusably slow with anything that involved the hard drive. It would take twice as long to boot. And anything that accessed the hard drive took forever to load, including small things like loading a new window in Chrome. It was otherwise sufficiently fast, though, which is not what I’d expect if it was a memory issue.
That said, I later bought a new computer, and it came with a small hard drive with Windows 10 on it, and it ran just fine. Sure, it took longer to boot than an SSD, but it was still faster than a normal Windows 7 boot on a hard drive. That said, I got an SSD very soon after getting the computer, so I never tried an upgrade on it. I’ve wondered if that’s where it went wrong.
I never did quite track down the issue, but, in general, I tell people to run Windows 10 on an SSD. Even when a hard drive works properly, going back to one still feels like the computer is significantly slower. I tend to recommend using a hard drive only as a second drive.
And, if I need the space and can only have one drive, I’d likely go for a hybrid drive.
Most of the computers around my office are aging PCs with HDDs running Windows 10. For most things they are fine, but every now and then they’ll inexplicably get hung up on something extremely simple, like renaming a file on the desktop.
Reading some of these comments in this thread alone, but also in many other places, makes me SO glad that I’ve stayed with Windows 7. I actually do run it with a Samsung Pro SSD as the system drive, but that’s just a nice-to-have optimization. It ran perfectly fine with the original HDD that it came with. I have a conventional mechanical HDD for storage. It’s a desktop and I almost never have to reboot it (current uptime: 77 days, 15 hours, 20 minutes) but when I do, it takes literally just a few seconds, and I’m sure almost all of that time is just interrogating the hardware.
ETA: The debates about how you absolutely MUST stay current with the latest version and latest updates of Windows are both interminable and tedious. Definitely not wanting to start such a debate here.
Sounds like the hard drive was likely failing. I recently had to replace mine as it had similar behavior. Thinks like deleting a folder with a few hundred files would take minutes. I tried a low level format but gave up after a few day. New hard drive with identical specs, everything is peachy.
Similar but not identical effect (I’ve seen it often enough), and unlikely, this was an off-the-shelf drive. I’ll keep it in mind though.
I had the same basic symptoms, though, and it didn’t happen when I went back to Windows 7.