Roger That

Best of luck to you. I assume you are aware of Blackpool's reputation? Not one of the finest towns the UK has to offer these days...

I doubt you'll be able to. I wouldn't overthink it, any drive is likely to be fine for general use.

I believe that the Crucial MX500 is regarded as one of the best SATA SSDs on the market so would probably be a solid purchase. Unless you have a particular use case, performance differences are largely on paper and unlikely to be noticeable in real life, so just buy based on brand preference / price.

I'm tapping out at this point...

Harsh truth: This PC is now pretty much e-waste. You've had a few years out of it (I guess?) which for the price you paid is probably pretty good. Time to replace. You can go used if money is tight. You can probably pick up a used 24" monitor for ~2000 THB (maybe less!) and an ex-business Lenovo, Dell, HP etc. PC in a compact case from Shopee, Lazada etc. for perhaps 6000THB. That'll be significantly better than what you have now. Make sure it has at least 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. That should keep you going for a few years with the potential to upgrade after that. Use an external hard drive (a branded one, Toshiba, Seagate, WD etc., not the trash one from Lazada above) or a USB flash drive to copy any important files from the old PC to the new one. It would make far more sense to do this now rather than waste any more time or money on this device. My 2c!

Bringing one back from Europe a year and a half ago definitely turned out to be a good decision!????

Edited: sorry, misread! ????

Just wanted to add another recommendation for Brother here. Good experiences with them.

This will be a tricky problem to solve on a forum as potentially a lot of background and information is needed. If you "lost Gmail due to leaving Google" where are you planning on receiving emails now - is this something the new host are supposed to be providing? If so, really they should give you the instructions on how to achieve this.

A tablet is what you want.

I get the same on sportsdirect.com (also AIS fibre). Probably geo-blocking, lots of websites block access from Thailand. Fitradio works for me though.

Yeah, Brother are the best at the low-end IMO.

I've got a feeling that AIS (and maybe others) hijack DNS queries (although I've never properly tested this). Presumably encrypted DNS (in particular DNS over https) would get round this although my knowledge on that is a bit sketchy. If anyone knows any better feel free to chime in!

It's an all round bad idea. Windows 11 isn't that different. I suspect after a few weeks you will get used to it.

It was a couple of years ago but I once contacted AIS fibre support via Twitter about a fairly technical issue and got someone who knew what they were talking about, could be worth a go? https://twitter.com/aisfibrehelp

Lazada don't seem to care about their desktop website very much. I guess I can't really blame them seeing as probably 90%+ of their sales will be via mobile app...

err, so it does change things then. Anyway, I'm glad it works for you and it seems to be from a legit German company which is always good. But even with the best intentions, with an app like this all it takes is for Microsoft to make a change behind the scenes and you could have some unpredictable results.

Apps like that are all well and good until months later you get some weird Windows / App issue that you can't fix and it turns out it's because you used an app to "customise" Windows ages ago...

That's setting the bar pretty low but even then I think dealing with Microsoft will be even more painful than here ????

Showing an interest in anti-virus suggests a desire to keep the PC secure. With this in mind, running an OS (Windows 7) that has not received updates / is out of support for over 2 years is a thoroughly bad idea. The only realistic solution is to update to a newer Windows. 11 would be logical as it is the newest but 10 would also be suitable.

In the interest of helping with the original problem and now we have narrowed it down, it would be good to get an answer to this. If indeed it is connected directly to the router, which router is it?

In fact, I just noticed that it is listed as Realtek PCle GbE family Controller - GbE means Gigabit Ethernet so it should be capable of 1000Mbps. Is it connected directly to the router or is something else in between?

Looks like that's the issue then! You could google the model number of your device to ensure it is indeed the port, there's a slim chance it could be the cable (worth swapping if you have a spare one to test with). The easiest way to solve it would be to buy a USB gigabit ethernet adapter, Lazada, Shopee will have loads and they'll be inexpensive. Good luck!

The only correct answer.

Why the heck would you go from SSD to HDD, RAID or not? What's the goal here?