Worth adding SSD to laptop?

Diggsy

Diggsy

Diggsy

Soldato
Joined
31 Aug 2007
Posts
4,856
Guys, hoping for a little help. My mums laptop (Acer) which is Core 2 Duo of some sort and 3/4gb Ram has slowed quite a bit over the time she's had it. She doesn't really use it for much other than word processing and the Internet.

Would an SSD be a worthwhile upgrade, or should she just get a new laptop? In kind of thinking the SSD would give it a healthy boost and maybe the new lease of life she needs.
 
I bought a new laptop last Christmas. A Lenovo Z500, Core i5, 8GB RAM, backlit keyboard, 1TB 5400rpm HDD. Performance was worse than my 4 year old Samsung R580 with half the RAM. After nearly 12 months of thinking this thing is rubbish, I decided the HDD was the bottleneck so took the plunge and 2 weeks ago ordered a Samsung Evo 840 120GB drive (£44 on Amazon) and a HDD caddy to replace the DVDR drive so I could keep the 1TB for file storage and forego the rarely used DVD drive. I rigged the Evo drive up with an old HDD to USB kit I bought a few years ago and used the proprietary Samsung cloning software to clone the HDD windows partition to the SSD, which took about 50 minutes.

Fitting the SSD was a nightmare, but only because the Lenovo requires you to take the thing completely apart to get to the HDD cage as it has no service hatches. The whole tear down and rebuild (including the DVD removal and replacement with the HDD in the caddy) took about 2 hours, but now I've done it once I could probably do it again in about 45 minutes I reckon.

Win8.1 now boots from cold to a login in about 5 seconds. From login to a usable desktop in about 7 seconds. Apps open like lightning. I've tuned up the settings (turned off the pagefile (shouldnt need one with 8GB on board)) to limit rewrites to the SSD, and the whole thing just whizzes along. Not yet found anything that doesnt seem to open or load in the blink of an eye.

Anyway, I'd recommend the OP just goes for it. The performance boost will blow you away.
 
I put my old ADATA 120GB SSD into my Acer Aspire 6930G along with a new RAM kit (4GB of DDR2 off ebay, daylight robbery) It's so much faster if the battery lasted more than an hour I'd use it out and about more. It's just an extra display/download machine.

I recommend using CloneZilla's bootable flavour to clone the drive if you're not planning a clean install. Although a clean install will make it even faster.
 
Thanks again guys, went for it! Just have to work out the best way to clone her old drive across. Any free solutions that work well?
 
Don't clone it! Fresh install all the way otherwise you won't feel the full benefit imo.

i just used a retail win 7 pro iso with an oem key off the bottom of my Samsung and it activated fine, no bloat ware, fresh start and all. Yes the ssd spead up my i3 laptop. Bear in mind it will probably only be able to do slow sata speeds like 300/300 so go for a cheaper drive with at least 240gb you don't need a 550mb/s for this laptop, unless you're planning ahead to upgrade to a newer laptop in future and want to transition the ssd over.
 
Diggsy said:
Thanks again guys, went for it! Just have to work out the best way to clone her old drive across. Any free solutions that work well?
Click to expand...

After messing around with a bunch of useless tat like clonezilla, I discovered Farstone DriveClone. It's free for home use, scales properly to larger and smaller drives and copes magnificently with uefi and mbr. It's windows based, and can clone any disk, including the currently active system partition on to any disk. Simple put, it's brilliant.

http://www.farstone.com/software/drive-clone.php
 
Crappy 5200rpm drives are what make most laptops so hideously slow. I have an SSD in my 1Ghz netbook and my i5 Laptop, both now absolutely fly!
 
BunnyKillBot said:
After messing around with a bunch of useless tat like clonezilla, I discovered Farstone DriveClone. It's free for home use, scales properly to larger and smaller drives and copes magnificently with uefi and mbr. It's windows based, and can clone any disk, including the currently active system partition on to any disk. Simple put, it's brilliant.

http://www.farstone.com/software/drive-clone.php
Click to expand...

That sounds perfect!! Thanks :)
 
All my PCs and Laptops have SSD for the system and a HD for the Data.
Sure, I lose the DVDRW but since I never need to use them anyway, plus if I absolutely have to, I bought an External some time ago, and its been used once and that was to test it works.

Laptops without an SSD should be made illegal and their owners should be sodomized with rather a large rhubarb.

And as for clonign the drive... What a silly waste of time!

It onyl takes something like 15 minutes to do a full install on any of my PCs.. .Well, ok, I may be a bit of a liar there, but certainly 15 minutes before I have windows in... I think that every driver I have just gets done automagically, and the only game I play these days is DawnOfWar and thats on steam and so all I need to do there is reinstall steam over itself and that means all my 200+ games are all ready to rick and only really need a DirectX upgrade, btu other than that, im good to go!
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom