Passmark 8 rating for Toshiba NB305 N455 Netbook

I had been testing and upgrading my laptops and desktops. Most are old ones. They are still useable.

The slowest is this netbook. Very hard to upgrade. The older Compaq C700 was upgraded with more RAM and better CPU but not possible with this netbook. It can only be upgraded with SSD.

I tried Sandisk Plus 240G but it turned out that this model is among the slowest but I do not think this is the reason. I had tested using an old Intel SSD 160G, which is slighty slower even,  in other desktops and laptops but they all improve performance significantly.

So I reverted back to hard disk. I tried 1T WD Black 7200rpm much earlier, but it also didn't improve much. Now, just use Seagate 120G, one of the slowest HD, but responses are reasonable. Just like the original.

The original was equipped with a 5400 rpm 160G hard disk running on Windows 7-32b. I had upgraded to Windows 10 but I didn't notice any improvement. It probably made it worse, because it turned out that Windows 10 does not support GMA3150. It impacted the response time.

Now, go back to Windows 7, but this time 64-bit version. I still do not feel much improvement but benchmarks results shoud improve.

In conclusion, no need to upgrade slow desktops that have slow CPUs like Intel Atoms and slow motherboards that can only handle SATA2 or less. Improvement in reliability afforded by SSD is not really worth it. Better reserve the SSD to other laptops.

On benchmarking, I tried the Windows Experience Index. It turned out that you can get a Windows 10 version. It is calculated using Winsat Formal. A software called WEI.exe can calculate it easily for you. However it didn't work for Windows XP. Even the Windows Vista version, which was reported to work with XP, but didn't in my case. Ths Passmark 8 can. Not the latest version, version9 and above.

Even this Passmark 8 cannot give any reading for 3D. Similarly for Userbenchmark. Userbenchmark cannot even run on Windows 7. Winsat will give a maximum reading of 9.9 which is silly but it did give the 2D reading of 3.2, despite not using any graphics driver apart from Basic VGA from Microsoft.

Now I know why WEI gives the highest value for disabled measurement. It allows a reasonable value for the overall score, instead of just 0, just because one test fails.




I actua


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