8.1 is a good office and home office/home tasks/daw+audio editing/media player OS. The laptop in question might be old and slow but can still have a use, even if its just as a backup machine incase your main pc/laptop craps out. Debian Live has gotten me out of crap creek a number of times.

8.1 is as easy as w7 to service and tweak so heres my suggestions for a office/home uffice(and other tasks i previously mentioned,

Remove - 3rd party published drivers(except those needed by the target host hardware), uneeded keyboards and languages, nets setup, cache and temp files, winsxs backup.

Tweak - disable/delete all uneeded scheduled tasks, autologgers and winevt channels, barebone services(keep networking).

Even on a old machine with that lot done 8.1 will be fast and while it wont win any benchmarking awards it will still be good for basic office and all home user tasks, except gaming of course.
 
router configuration
This is a very important topic and should be taken seriously if you are here building a 'gamer' OS that is stripping AV/Security out of windows, no updates, using EoL builds and games online while relying on that ISP modem that is hot garbage and should be replaced with a decent firewall device/distro as it will provide a safer/better online gaming experience.

Imo, what is the point of having absolute amazing 1% / 0.1% lows if your connection is suffering from buffer bloat or dropping packets because your modem is handling too many connections? i.e., because someone in your house fires up YouTube in 4k, uploading 100's of files to cloud services or you left your seed box running at full steam and you have no bandwidth management internally to prioritise your gaming traffic first. Maybe your OS is compromised, spamming millions of DNS entries and is part of a larger global DoS attack you have no idea about, all you notice is the game is lagging a little and PC feels sluggish :)

Your home network it’s a lot like tweaking/stripping your OS, it's painful to learn at first but after a while you start to know exactly how things are setup and should act. Then you try to limit any or all overheads where possible, leading to some peace of mind knowing you’re protecting your privacy/data and that naked 'Gamer' OS.

My last point on this is that It's even more important when you are using an End-of-life OS's, these are generally targets for spyware/malware bot groups as Microsoft have stopped deploying security patches (unless you are able to get your hands on a LTS version of windows and haven't completely disabled windows security updates). Settings up a decent firewall and using tools such as CrowdSec IPS, IDS, DNS/GEO IP blockers can go a long way in protecting you and your home network/Gaming OS.

I like to think of it this way, Using an OS that is stripped to its core and connecting it to the internet with no home networking improvements, is like playing on a public playground licking the handles and expecting not to get sick. It's only a matter of time before your in bed firing at both ends regretting your decisions... now EoL builds, those things should never see the internet period, they should be completely sandboxed, hidden away and kept as your dirty little secret.

ps. great guides Hellbovine
 
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well, they gave me an ancient laptop (BGA479 cpu 2 cores) windows 10 does not pull, but Windows 8.1 is fine.I'm not for games, for office work... It's a pity to throw it away, I will give it for very very inexpensive to anyone who needs it. In Kazakhstan, we count every cent and survive as best we can...therefore, such a request.thanks to all the caring people
My preset is old and NTLite has changed a lot since I created it, I need to test it again. I haven't played NTLite for a long time, I need to update my presets and test them. NTLite doesn't work very well on Win8.1 in my experience, perhaps due to low popularity so few people report problems.

But an SSD can help, Windows 10 runs poorly on laptops many times due to them having 5400 RPM hard drives which have very low transfer rates. But I think if this laptop's video device is bad then Win7 will run better than 8.1 and 10.

I don't see any benefit in using 8.1 over 7 or 10
It depends on the hardware, I think if you have a good onboard video or video card then Win8.1 will run faster than Win7. On my desktop Win8.1 runs better.

Win10/11 is the worst of them in performance but it is often necessary to have support on newer hardware and to keep having software and driver support, nvidia for example dropped support for Win7/8.1.
 
Latest nvidia gt710 driver was published 22nd Nov.
I would be suprised if 20 members use 8.1, to hazard a guess i saw 10 users max so any issues wont be found but when they are report them and they will be fixed, it may take a while because 10 and 11 are priorities but it will be fixed.

Even if you go easy on it 8.1 can be made to fly with the existing options and add in tweaks from elsewhere its as good as w7 from a standard home user/home office tasks point of view. I will be taking another look at 8.1 when it dies in january.

Windows 10 runs poorly on laptops many times due to them having 5400 RPM hard drives which have very low transfer rates.
And the very low seek times. Even a cheap crucial(have been very reliable) ssd leaves a 5400rpm spinner in the dust.
 
it may take a while because 10 and 11 are priorities but it will be fixed.
This happens too, the priority will be the most recent OS/Build at the moment. So for those who can it's better to use the latest build of Win10/11 to have better support and less problems with NTLite. Though if you are patient and careful it is perfectly possible to use NTLite in old OS/Build too.

And the very low seek times. Even a cheap crucial(have been very reliable) ssd leaves a 5400rpm spinner in the dust.
Very well remembered, seek times is essential too. I have a BX500 that runs Win10 just fine :)
 
Seek times are around 2ns for solid state storage(even cheap sandisk usb keys) vs 8ns + for a spinner. Start a portable program from a sandisk cruzer blade(entry level) and even without prefetch startup is instantaneous. I am still rocking MX500s but i got 2 120GB BX's for testing are they are good enough.
 
When I bought the BX500 the MX500 was much more expensive here in Brazil but now SSD prices have plummeted here. MX500 is probably one of the best options for those who can't use NVMe.
 
My MX500 500GB's have been rock solid in 3 to 4 years ive had them and they have taken a massive amount of punishment and even if they have changed the gubbins(the guts, the insides) of them i would still recommend them and Crucial(i only use Ballistix ram). The BX's dont have a cache if i remember correctly. There are still a ton of old dell(etc) machines that were capable of 8.1 from the factory(my 2 laptops) and intel8/9th gen is capable of running 8.1 even though its not an officially supported OS.

8.1 gets a bad rap because of windows 8 but having never used w8 ive got nothing except w7 and w10 to compare to so 8.1 is as good and easy to tweak as w7 while having a modern ui, sorry but w7 aero sucks monkey balls, runs like 7, has inbox usb3 drivers unlike 7 and looks like 10.
Traffic on eightforums looks healthy.
 
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The bad reputation in Win8/8.1 is also due to the sudden change in the UI, since Win95 the interface had practically the same appearance with the start menu etc and in Win8 the start menu and the desktop disappeared.

In Win10 the classic look came back and now in Win11 they changed it all again.
 
The bad reputation in Win8/8.1 is also due to the sudden change in the UI, since Win95 the interface had practically the same appearance with the start menu etc and in Win8 the start menu and the desktop disappeared.

In Win10 the classic look came back and now in Win11 they changed it all again.
Average users hate things that change when they have been around for awhile.
 
Average users hate things that change when they have been around for awhile.
And it gets worse as you get older. I actually like the flat metro themes of 8.1 and 10. I dont use a start menu at all nowadays except on debian.
Classic themes are bloody awfull. Windows 7 basic theme is a cross between Fisher-Price and vomit. Cant find a decent metro theme for w7 that doesnt include h--king system files. Still using Prairie Wind as a wallypaper.
 
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well said! i am glad someone else has cautioned fellow users about "tweaks" that are sheer myths or snake oil. alot of people post misinformation or straight up nonsense, like "speeds up gaming performance" when in actual fact, it does nothing, and the OP just wants clicks on their post / attention
 
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