Speeding up an old laptop

Sneblot · 31 May 2016 at 22:40

I am sorry if this is the incorrect sub forum for this, though currently straddles both laptop and storage drives.

I currently have a toshiba satellite c660 which is now 6 years old, it currently is running Kubuntu though I was hoping for some advice on how to speed this laptop up.

I wondered if I was to get a new SSD for this laptop, would this speed up general use or just an decrease in load up times?

Thanks for the help.

cadmunkey · 1 Jun 2016 at 00:39

SSDs transform old laptops. They're so cheap now there's no reason not to try it.

4T5 · 1 Jun 2016 at 00:50

Max out the RAM as well.

BuZ · 1 Jun 2016 at 16:24

What's the actual specifications of the laptop? For example and such as: CPU cores and speed in GHz, RAM, HDD size and speed, etc. I would probably opt for Puppy Linux because it is made to run on such low end hardware...

Sneblot · 8 Jun 2016 at 09:01

BuZ said:
What's the actual specifications of the laptop? For example and such as: CPU cores and speed in GHz, RAM, HDD size and speed, etc. I would probably opt for Puppy Linux because it is made to run on such low end hardware...

The cpu is a i3-380M, I thought I had max capacity as this was what I had been told when I took delivery of the laptop back in 2010, (I knew a lot less then) though checking the other night shows that it only has 4Gb and the total capacity is 8Gb (yay), HDD is 320Gb @5,400rpm.

My plan is to get these:
Vengeance SODIMM 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz SODIMM Kit

Though I'm just wanting to double check, there wouldn't be a maximum memory speed would there? The current modules are 1066MHz.

Zefan · 8 Jun 2016 at 09:25

The motherboard should just run the RAM at whatever speed it supports, whether or not you can fiddle with that much will depend on the settings available in your UEFI/BIOS settings.

Sneblot · 8 Jun 2016 at 10:23

Zefan said:
The motherboard should just run the RAM at whatever speed it supports, whether or not you can fiddle with that much will depend on the settings available in your UEFI/BIOS settings.

Cheers for the feed back.

linktoinsanity · 10 Jun 2016 at 16:23

Sneblot said:
HDD is 320Gb @5,400rpm.

Definitely get an SSD as well...

BluD · 10 Jun 2016 at 17:59

yeah a cheap SSD makes all the difference, i got a second hand 120gb evo for like 20 quid and banged it in my 2010 laptop and its really fast now, starts up in seconds.

Phil87 · 13 Jun 2016 at 15:06

I agree that adding an SSD will make all the difference. I did that to my laptop from 2011 which has a 2nd gen i5, and that made it much faster. You just need to make sure that the laptop supports AHCI and that it is enabled in the BIOS (it probably will be supported).

I also upgraded to 8GB which probably helps with some games, but unfortunately there isn't much I can do about the GPU which is a GT 540m.

MrFunex · 13 Jun 2016 at 15:49

Totally agree with the SSD recommendations. I took the advice of this thread and upgraded a 5-year old i5 laptop from a 750Gb hybrid drive to a 500Gb SSD.

According to CrystalDiskMark, raw transfer rates have increased from 100 to 550Mb/sec and random scatter data rates from 0.9(!) to 180Mb/sec! A cold start to Win10 now takes 12 seconds, with 3ish seconds taken up showing the Acer logo at startup!

SSD is a Samsung 850 EVO.