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I currently have a 5 year old HP laptop running Windows 7. I live in a rural area where our internet speeds are 1 MB or less. I am actually able to do skype calls and online video chats with people online even with my poor internet connection (it is very low quality but it works).

Windows 7 is starting to get a bit old and I was thinking that it was time to get a new laptop. The first laptop that I got was a HP Stream 15 or 14 inch screen with 4 GB of RAM. I know that it is not a powerful computer, but I mostly just browse the web and use skype. Unfortunately, Windows 10 has such large updates that 100% of my internet connection is always consumed by updates. My DSL modem is running/sending traffic continually. At times, it is very difficult to even get it to load google. The HP Stream has behaved like this even when it was new - so it doesn't have a virus and I installed a virus checker and did a scan to verify that it has no viruses. My Windows 7 laptop does not consume large amounts of bandwidth like the HP Stream. I also tried setting my wifi connection to be metered, but it still consumes all of my available internet bandwidth.

The next device that I tried was an Acer Chromebook. I know that skype doesn't run natively on chromebooks, but I found some online browser based video chat websites and tried using one of these (there is also an online version of skype). However, about 10 minutes into the chat, the entire labtop's screen goes black and it crashes.

So I've now tried both Windows 10 and Chromebooks. Windows 10 would be fine if it could download multi-gigabyte updates (I've even left my HP Stream on overnight in hopes that it would download the updates, but it is still not done in the morning). Chromebooks would be fine if they didn't crash.

What is a good recommendation for a labtop that would work well on a super slow internet connection? Should I look for a new windows 7 labtop? Macs are too expensive for me to try.

Alex
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David
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  • Hi, Welcome to Hardware Recs! Unfortunately, your internet speeds will not increase just because you buy a more powerful system. If your question is "how to increase my internet speed", this is out of scope for the website. – Bennett Yeo Aug 02 '18 at 15:16
  • Your problem isn't going to be hardware, its your internet connection. –  Aug 02 '18 at 15:16
  • Well my windows 7 labtop works fine with my slow internet speed and my internet speed isn't likely to increase anytime soon. As stated in my question, I could buy another windows 7 labtop if no newer operating systems can run on slow internet connections, but microsoft will eventually drop windows 7 support. – David Aug 03 '18 at 01:05
  • Bottom line, Windows 7 laptops are very efficient at what they do. – Alex Nov 13 '18 at 12:53

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Chromebooks can run Android apps, the problem with that is that you will see more frequent updates of apps and Skype for example is quite big for what it does (~150MB). If you are lucky you may notice that updates get smaller with newer operating systems like Chrome OS, Windows 10 or Fedora which should be able to use delta compression and only download the new bits. At least Fedora should be able to do that with DeltaRPMs which it uses by default. I don't know how it plays out for flatpak updates or Silverblue though.

LiveWireBT
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