Had to pop into downtown to do some business stuff this morning, so I decided to pop in on the good folks over at Wyndham Arts Supplies to pick up some useful little tools.

Thankfully someone popped in with this solid little Dell laptop with a dilapidated hard disk drive.  No important data.

Essentially a task in computer repair 101 – replace a hard drive and install an operating system.

So we swapped the hard drive for a solid state drive, giving the machine a tremendous boost of speed.  This is an upgrade worth considering for anyone with a box-store laptop such as this that is running chronically slowly.

The drives in those systems are almost always 1 terabyte drives with disks that spin at only 5400 rotations per minute.  These are some of the slowest classes of hard drives.

If you learn nothing else from today’s post, learn this:  A computer will only move as fast as it’s SLOWEST part.

The processor is the first part, and the fastest.  The RAM comes next, in both regards.  Then the storage devices.  (Usually, it can get more complicated than this, but let’s not overcomplicate things here).

Replacing these box-store 1 terabyte 5400 rotations per minute hard drives with the newer Solid State Drive technology substantially boosts the reaction time of your machine!

Even with a great processor like the Intel i5-grade CPU this one is sporting, the machine lags excessively because it is so often stuck waiting for the big, slow hard drive disks to spin around and grab your data.

This one, with an SSD and Windows 10 installed and updated, was done in less than 3 hours, and now moves fast as lightning.

So if you have a computer like this, and are sick and tired of it acting all laggy and scraggy, consider investing a couple hundreds bucks or so in an upgrade to a Solid State Drive.  If you’re feeling brave, grab your screw driver and try to do it all yourself.  If you’re not, bring it my way for a free quote, or to some other tech you trust.

Or just keep letting your big, slow hard drive steal your valuable time.  Whatever floats your boat, my friends.

Thanks bunches for reading!