Can anyone recommend replacement laptop for elderly Toshiba Sattelite c660d?

[medpat]

My Lenovo laptop has worked well for several years and wasn't expensive. Upgraded to Microsoft 10 no problem.

[mike175]

If you're getting a Windows machine, beware of some of the 'mini-laptops' or netbooks. Most of them have very small (usually solid-state) hard drives and limited RAM. A friend bought one and it will now not accept the latest Windows upgrade due to lack of space. They're cheap for a reason!

If you plan to do any serious work on it, I would go for a proper laptop every time. As said by others, netbooks and chromebooks are really just used as terminals to access online software in the 'cloud' (i.e. someone else's computer)

Mike.

[andrewalston]

A friend bought one and it will now not accept the latest Windows upgrade due to lack of space. They're cheap for a reason!

You can usually get the latest Windows on with the aid of one or two external USB drives, though it is a bit of a hassle. I've done a couple of these now.

You need to use one USB drive of at least 4GB to hold the install files, and one with at least 8GB as working space. If you have a 16GB stick, it can be used for both.

• Google for "Windows 10 ISO". Microsoft should be the first site.
• "Download Tool" and use it to create a USB drive with the install files on it. Virtually all these machines run 64-bit Windows; the image doesn't care whether it is Home or Pro. These small machines won't have a DVD drive.
• Run Disk Clean-up (under Windows Administrative Tools)
• Click on "Clean up system files"
• Ensure "Windows Update clean-up" is ticked. This will give the most space back. There are probably other things you can tidy too.
• Let clean-up complete. This may take a while.
• Insert the USB drive you made earlier, and run SETUP from it.
• Setup should work out for itself that you are updating to the fresh version.
• It will also work out that there is not enough space.
• You get the option to use space on an external drive. It will tell you how much space it needs.
• You might also need to move photos etc. to an external drive.
• The update might take longer than on other systems, but it should complete OK.
• Copy back the stuff you shifted off to make space.

If the update fails, it will roll back to leave you as you were before - though you will still have stuff to copy back.

[mike175]

Andrew,
Thanks for the information. Expect I'll end up trying to sort it out for her when I have some free time 

Mike.