Old, Slow ASPIRE ONE D255E. Constant disk activity. Fix? New OS? How to make it usable.

I have on old ASPIRE ONE D255E with 1GB RAM running Windows 7 Starter. When I bought it many years ago, it was slow (as you would expect) but usable. When I dug it out of the closet and blow the dust off it, it booted up just fine, but now it's so slow that it's unusable. The disk activity light comes on and stays in, 100% of the time. It's apparently constantly accessing or writing the page file so it's very unresponsive to the keyboard. I'm wondering how I can make it usable again.

Adding more memory would be an option, but I tried it twice, with memory guaranteed to work, and both times it failed. It didn't see the new memeory, so I'm stuck with 1GB. The disk has about 80GB free space, so that's not an issue. It's defragged too.

If it run it in safe mode with network, It's usable again. I can browse the web and the disk activity light stays off most of the time. If I start it in diagnostic mode it's fine (though with no network/internet access).

So there's some service or utility that's causing the pagefile access. I've disabled startup programs and removed a bunch of stuff including virus protection software, but with a normal boot it's still accessing the pagefile all the time and is very slow and unresponsive.

Any ideas what might be causing the problem or how to find out what component is causing this constant pagefile activity? Running in Safe-mode isn't ideal. I'm not sure how to add internet access in diagnostic mode.

I suppose one option might be to boot from a thumb drive with some version of Linux? For this PC I could live with just internet access. Anyone tried a Linux boot?

Any comments/suggestions welcome

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Ishy

Hi, @Rob_A you can try to reset the device and check if that helps but it would remove all data from the device so backup your data if you choose to try it. also one more thing is cleaning the device components might help. What I mean is that there could be dust build up within the device fan and components since said you hadn't used it long while.

Also try to default all of the settings of the computer.
Try Bios Default:
1) Shutdown the device.
2) Press the power button immediately press F2 button multiple times which will allow you to go to bios.
3) Press F9 and then press enter.
4) Press F10 then save and exit.
5) Check if it works, if not then there might a damage to the audio port. Try to check with acer warranty support for further assistance or local technician.

topcat7736

If it's been packed away for years, Windows probably has a lot of updates to do. Connect it to an Ethernet cable, and leave it on for a day of so and see if the activity decreases. Occasionally you might need to restart the machine to install the updates which have been downloaded. Left click the blue ball to see if any are pending. You can do a restart instead of Shut Down to install them.

When Windows 10 finally replaces your starter, your machine will act like a regular machine where you can change the background, etc. The Windows 10 won't install until all the years of 7's missing updates have been completed.

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