RayLopez99 wrote:
Thanks Paul.

I think I will take it to the PC shop, run by a bunch of Filipinos
who do good work but I always have to check their work since they use
pirated software and i've found viruses/malware on my machine after
going there before (I don't think they did it on purpose, but you never
know in this country, lol).

But I just found a confounding factor: the PC mechanical HDD is very
very slow now, showing 99% usage and only 0.7 MB/s throughput. Quick
scan shows no viruses. Implications from a internet forum is that it's a
failing hard drive. Scandisk (from within Tools| Filemanager ) shows no
clear errors (but this program is not that reliable, perhaps use Gizmo's
"Crystal Disk Info"? https://www.techsupportalert.com/con...diskinfo.htm-0 )

I think I need a new hard drive, preferably a solid-state SSD, agree?
While I am there, I will ask the boys to install Windows 10, home edition,
64x bit? That will do it. And I don't think I will lose my license key
with Microsoft, since the MAC address doesn't change, being on the motherboard,
when you replace a hard drive, as you have said or implied.

If you have a freeware program to check hard disk health for Windows 10,
feel free to recommend. I just downloaded HDDScan – Free HDD Diagnostic Utility.

Thanks,
RL

99% usage and 1MB/sec can happen when Windows Defender is
doing a scan of C: . Make sure you aren't mis-interpreting the
Task Manager performance screen. Windows 10 has a bad habit of
doing stuff, at the same instant you want to do something.

On a HDD, scanning many small files drops the I/O rate to 1MB/sec
and makes the disk 100% busy doing head seeks.

Resource Monitor (a link at the bottom of Task Manager : Performance)
can show which program is doing I/O right now. Or if you see
a Service Host scanning a whole bunch of "Packages", that's Windows
Update activity.

An SSD will certainly speed things up, but what kind of price
will you pay there for an SSD ? I have a Samsung SSD in the
Test Machine, but it still takes 49 seconds to boot. There are
some things that are still a limitation of Windows 10.

You can use HDTune and look at the Health tab. It has
a table of SMART values. The program knows nothing of
SSDs and only knows the SMART table of hard drives.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

You want "reallocated" and "Current Pending" to be zero.
The two yellow marks are bogus and should not be there.
The benchmark curve for that drive is still "mint quality".

https://s33.postimg.cc/mmiax893z/my_...t3500418as.gif

That version is ten years old.

Also note that, since about the last version or two of
Windows 10, the HDTune benchmark is off a bit. If it
used to report 100MB/sec, the measurement now might
show 90-95MB/sec and could be a little on the low side.
Since your Windows 10 is 10240, there's no danger there :-)
One version of Windows 10 tried to "hijack" the SMART table,
causing gibberish to appear in HDTune. Again, your 10240 version
won't cause that problem. (The "winver" program reports
the OS version.)

Seagate and WDC have their own disk test software,
and there will be a version that runs from Windows.
You can do the "short SMART" test, which is an internal
test reading a series of locations. You need to know
which brand of hard drive is involved, to download
the right program to test.

I'm pretty sure some version of Crystal has a SMART
table in it. And you can also get SMARTMonTools in
Linux to give a health report. Except, you have the
booting situation from hell (would Linux even boot?),
so I have to be careful to not give you too adventurous
sets of options :-)

If you had reliable boot options on the machine, we could
have a lot more fun.

I'm sure by the time your PC Shop is done with that
laptop, they won't be sad to see it go out the door.
I don't think the hardware is bad. It has an IPS LCD panel,
and sounds like it has some positive aspects from that
perspective. But the InsydeH2O BIOS is "a piece of work".
I have that on my Acer laptop, and thank goodness I've
never needed to adjust anything. I haven't had a problem
getting it to boot. The popup boot works, and I suspect
it uses legacy (CSM module) as its operating mode. The
popup boot window is very short, and the time window to press
the key for it, is slightly less than one second wide.

Paul