My wife's primary computer is a Toshiba Satellite something-or-other. It's a few years old -- we bought it new directly from Toshiba when they were shipping with Vista, so I'm guessing probably about four years, plus-or-minus. It originally came with 2 GB or RAM She began complaining about speed (lack thereof), so a year and a half ago or so I upgraded it to 4 GB of RAM, and then about six months ago I migrated her to Windows 7. I thought it ran smoother and faster after the upgrades.
Apparently my wife disagrees. Today she complained again about how slow her computer is, and she doesn't like Toshibas because they are too slow (she doesn't understand that every brand has slower and faster, cheaper and more expensive, models. Hers is a Toshiba. hers is too slow. Ergo: Toshibas are too slow.
I'm not averse to getting her a new computer. After four years, it may even be a good idea ... even though both my desktop and my notebook are older and I'm soldiering on just fine. I thik there are actiually two issues going on here:
First, we're somewhat in the boonies. Not like Tallpine, but we're not exactly "downtown," either. We have AT&T DSL, but what we have is either the slowest or second slowest of the four speeds they offer, and they have told me that we can't get a faster speed due to the length of wire between us and the nearest central switching station. So that's one possible problem, dpending on what she's trying to do.
The other issue is that my wife has never encountered an add-on menu bar she didn't like. When I open her browser, there's virtually no browsing window visible because sh has so many tiers of manu bards stacked across the top of her screen. I'm sure all of that junk sucks processing speed voraciously -- but I don't know if more memory or a faster processor would be the better response to it.
To better sort out how much of the (alleged) problem is due to physical connection speed and how much is due to the computer, can any of you geeks steer me to some (freeware) benchmarking utilities for Windoze? I'd like something to assess just the computer, and then I'd like something to assess upload and download speeds to the Internet.
Also, what would be decent (not blazing fast) benchmarks we could/should be looking for? She does NOT play on-line games, so we don't need a gaming machine. Mostly, she does e-mail, Skype, Facebook ... and she shops ... a lot.
TIA