Upgrading computers

[R3DS!X]

I have a couple of desk tops in my office that are running Windows 7. I want to upgrade to Windows 10. The specs
i5-4460
CPU 3.2 GHz
RAM 4.0
64 Bit
SSD 500G
These are just general office machines for accounting and office stuff. No heavy duty graphics or gaming.
Will I regret upgrading or should I replace?

aside from your ram you got better specs than my gaming rig that runs windows 10.
I would do a clean install

 

[stangmx13]

most stable Win10 is LTSB version. Designed for critical business operations that can't withstand any downtime.

It runs fine in 2gb machine (W8Pro NUC). Just uninstall all unnecessary software and disable unused services and Windows will only consume 600mb. That leaves 1400mb for apps.

on DDR3-1600 like the OPs machine? 10th gen Intel is DDR4-2933 IIRC.

I wonder how much that old slow ram is impacting performance.

 

[rodr]

I'm in a computer death spiral.
Want to purchase Turbo Tax as I fired my bookkeeper.
TT only works on W10.
Upgrade to W10 requires more RAM

Doesn't TurboTax have an online version?

Also I read somewhere that the Windows version messes with your hard drive for DRM, not cool in my book.

 

[DannoXYZ]

on DDR3-1600 like the OPs machine? 10th gen Intel is DDR4-2933 IIRC.

I wonder how much that old slow ram is impacting performance.

RAM only matters if you've got large datasets you're moving around. For media-server, not gonna make difference. It's connected to my TV and has no trouble streaming videos, downloading torrents and crunching videos down to X265. On this box, CPU is limitation and I've got it pegged at close to 90% of time.

 

[dravnx]

My other option is to drag my W10 laptop from home and use it to do my taxes. I've upgraded both machines by replacing the hard drives with Samsung SSD's and they are much quicker to boot up now. One machine was making noise from the HD so it was time.
I'll have to look into the online version of Turbo Tax. That might be the answer.
Now I have to hit the shop and get in some billable time.
Thanks for all the help.

 

[JesasaurusRex]

Ive upgraded 7 to 10 on two computers, iirc, without issue.

I think if you add ram and an ssd youll be plenty happy. If you were closer id say swing by i got some extra ddr3 laying around.

 

[TylerW]

most stable Win10 is LTSB version. Designed for critical business operations that can't withstand any downtime.

It runs fine in 2gb machine (W8Pro NUC). Just uninstall all unnecessary software and disable unused services and Windows will only consume 600mb. That leaves 1400mb for apps.

It took me a second to realize you were talking about ram.
Because win10 will eat 1.4gb in about five minutes of disk cacheing.

 

[davidji]

I've done 7->10 upgrade on a couple of older, slowish PCs. Both machines were happier after the upgrade. And in each case it was free. I think it still is, at least for home use. There was a free upgrade that may have been supposed to expire but didn't.

 

[rodr]

As a Linux user, what I did was install Win 10 in a (VirtualBox) VM for those occasional times when I need it. This provides a lot of flexibility. As I write this I'm making a backup of the VM prior to applying the latest upgrades.

 

[dravnx]

That is above my paygrade.

 

[DannoXYZ]

It took me a second to realize you were talking about ram.
Because win10 will eat 1.4gb in about five minutes of disk cacheing.

Yes, as any good OS should. Windows finally got onto this bandwagon 30-years later. But it also releases this memory as needed for apps. A lot of memory-management tricks used in Win10 came from thin-client craze back in '90s with WindowsFLP and WindowsThinPC. I actually set up about 10,000 of these back then. Well, actually just 5, then IT Dept. cloned them throughout empire.

I've got Win10-LTSB running on Dell D620 laptop just fine (2.5gb RAM, 2.0ghz Core2Duo CPU). As revealed in other "regularly hanging thread", there's tonnes of extra apps and background services that's not needed. Removing and disabling those frees up HUGE amount of memory and CPU resources. All these phone-home-to-mothership stuff is useless; slows down system. Can even cause regular freezes and outright crashes. Just say NO to bloatware.

 

[DannoXYZ]

I'm still in love with the old workstations like these. It completely took away any interest in building anything.

Yeah, that's nice! X5570 Xeon X2 is very buff! I had Dell box like that 10-yrs ago and ran VMware ESXi on it. Ended up with 10 servers running OracleDB back-end, Peoplesoft, BEA-Weblogic front-end. Served up 6 different websites and almost saturated 1g feed from Time-Warner. Then built 2nd box just like it for redundancy. Saved my company $144k/month getting off Oracle-hosting!