Windows 7 Preferred Browser

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DamageInc

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#239330 12-Jul-2018 14:19

Hello,

My elderly mum's laptop (64bit windows 7 home premium with 3gb ram) not the fastest thing in the world, currently runs the google chrome browser for Facebook and related games.

Are there better options more suited for a not-so-powerful machine:

Firefox

Opera

Brave

Edge (not sure if its available for windows 7?)

Appreciate any help

P/s....I haven't ruled out moving mum to a Linux flavor, will see.

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Handsomedan

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#2055028 12-Jul-2018 14:21

My son's Win7 PC runs Firefox fairly well.

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Rikkitic

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#2055107 12-Jul-2018 14:42

I use Chrome. There are things not to like about it but the modern versions seem okay for browsing and streaming.

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DamageInc

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#2055113 12-Jul-2018 14:49

Handsomedan:

My son's Win7 PC runs Firefox fairly well.

And i believe Mozilla have made inroads into being a lighter browser?

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gzt

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#2055136 12-Jul-2018 15:09

I'd stick with chrome for security and ease of updates. Any particular problems?

Removing antivirus browser extensions can be a performance win if it's really bad. Nice to have but wrong home page and other issues.

Ram looks good. What processor?

DamageInc

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#2055665 13-Jul-2018 11:13

gzt: I'd stick with chrome for security and ease of updates. Any particular problems?

Removing antivirus browser extensions can be a performance win if it's really bad. Nice to have but wrong home page and other issues.

Ram looks good. What processor?

Sorry for the delay in my reply, had to get the specs off my mums laptop.

Just slow

Here are the specs:

Windows 7 home premium
64bit
AMD Athlon 11x2 P340
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250
3gb WDR3 ram
320gb HWD
DVD Super-multi DL drive
802.11 b/g/n
6 cell Li-ion battery

Might not even be the browser, could be just a slow laptop?

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DamageInc

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#2055666 13-Jul-2018 11:14

Also trying to sort this so she doesn't fork out for a new PC

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Oblivian

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#2055702 13-Jul-2018 12:50

64b on 3Gb RAM will be a squeeze. If not doing a lot of 3D jump into bios and lower the video allocation down a bit to get some more.. You'll probably find there is only 700MB-1.2 actually usable once the OS has at it similar to my olds PC. Makes for slow initial opening of browsers etc.

The rest of the speed loss comes from the browser caching data - more and more they try to 'enhance' your experience by caching more and more of the site locally = disk writes. Both a slow drive and less RAM will impact that. Think the push for it now is due to SSDs being just so fast.

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shrub

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#2055704 13-Jul-2018 13:00

DamageInc:

gzt: I'd stick with chrome for security and ease of updates. Any particular problems?

Removing antivirus browser extensions can be a performance win if it's really bad. Nice to have but wrong home page and other issues.

Ram looks good. What processor?

Sorry for the delay in my reply, had to get the specs off my mums laptop.

Just slow

Here are the specs:

Windows 7 home premium
64bit
AMD Athlon 11x2 P340
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250
3gb WDR3 ram
320gb HWD
DVD Super-multi DL drive
802.11 b/g/n
6 cell Li-ion battery

Might not even be the browser, could be just a slow laptop?

With those specs it would of been slow 8 years ago when new. If you must keep it going upgrade the hdd to an SSD for loading speeds but yea not going to ever be fast.