What (if anything) will my Compaq V5000 Presario laptop with its AMD Sempron 3300+ 2.0GHz CPU be able to do with Firefox 4.0?
I have a Compaq V5000 Presario laptop, driven by an AMD Sempron 3300+ 2.0GHz CPU and running Windows XP Home. I've been managing well enough with Firefox 3.6.12, and haven't had time to install .13 through .15 -- but since I saw PCs at work being updated to .16, I decided to download that upgrade and see if it would still fit and work on my machine.
So I follow the "more information" link from the upgrade notice box -- and, after going through the extra step you make us take of going to a separate page to look at the requirements (can't that be part of the upgrade page itself?!), I decide it looks like I can try it. But when I go to download 3.6.16, I get sent to a page for downloading version 4.0 instead. (And when I do find a download for 3.6.16, there's a stern warning that it's not going to last very long.)
So I go back and look at the 4.0 page . . . and the requirements for that are enough different that I need to have my questions answered before I'm going to take a chance on downloading that. (And no, I'm not going to buy a new computer just to move up to 4.0; I have more important things to be saving up for, starting with a wedding and a honeymoon.)
So I need to know whether my current laptop computer will be able to use 4.0 -- and what problems or limitations on usefulness I will have if I do upgrade.
Wšykne wótegrona (6)
Yes, you should be able to use Firefox 4 on that system without any problems. Firefox 4 fully supports Windows XP and and the hardware in your computer, so there should not be any special limitations.
Thanks for addressing this. But just to be a little clearer . . . I shouldn't expect any significant slowing up? No significant differences in use of resources, despite the increase in requirements (and the addition of a requirement for SSE2, which I'm not tech-dedicated enough to know about without looking it up)?
Wót jalp změnjony
Firefox 4 should be faster than Firefox 3.6 in most ways. I would not expect any slow-down from upgrading.
Well, that may be enough assurance to make it worth my while to download the new version -- though I still don't feel a need for implementing it, and I'm disquieted by the fairly numerous reports of problems I see when I come to Help to look up my question.
If you have any problems after upgrading, please let us know and we'll be happy to help out. And you can also go back to the older version if you decide you need to: http://www.firefox.com/all-older.html
Firefox 4 has been downloaded over 25 million times in the past three days. Only a fraction of a percent of users have reported problems to us, but that still adds up to thousands of messages here in the support forums.
First, let me thank you again for your time and attention to my inquiry. I do wish Firefox and the Mozilla community well -- and I would agree that not nearly everyone who has downloaded version 4 has complained.
OTOH, I don't know what your multiplier is -- that is, how many downloaders on average actually having some kind of problem it takes for one of them/us to find it worth her/his time and trouble to input complaints this way. And thousands of messages does also still add up to quite a number of different problems. And my PC is old enough that it is perhaps more susceptible to problems and limitations.
So I have downloaded version 4 -- but I'm not planning to install it immediately . . . not until I have the time and patience accumulated to handle installation and its problems, whether they're teething problems or teasing problems or absolute lockdown/drag-out fights.