Part 1 – Why and what to buy
Many people are still using Windows 7 and complaining that their computer is so slow and takes for ever to boot up or close down. Then one day, they are faced with one of their favourite software no longer working on Windows 7. So they come up with the obvious plan: I will get a new laptop computer and it will come with Windows 10 and it will be faster and better…
The reality is slightly different: YES you should move to Windows 10 and YES everything will run faster but NO, you don’t need to spend money on a new laptop. In this post, if will explain how to get 80% of the benefits for 10% of the cost.
First, lets get one thing out of the way: Windows 7 was released in 2009 and is no longer supported by Microsoft. This means that security vulnerabilities are no longer patched and that you are leaving yourself potentially open to the threat of hackers (and all computers on your home or business network).
Second point: Computer laptop technology has started to plateau in recent years compared to the amazing progress it regularly made in the past. If you take a mid-range laptop today, processor, bus and memory speed have all increased a bit in the past years – and more software now runs in 64 bit instead of 32bit – but what really makes it a much faster computer than an old one is one thing: its the hard drive !
As software programs became more formidable and nicer looking, they also become bigger. You need more memory for them to work and also more space on your hard drive to store them. When you want to use a program, the computer reads it off the hard drive and puts a portion of it in memory, then swaps more of it (or other programs) as you use them. These constant disk reads is what limits/dictates the speed of all the other components. So, in a modern computer, the old rotating plater Hard Disk Drive (HDD) has been replaced with a Solid Stated Drive (SSD) which uses technology more akin to RAM memory: computer memory chips that can be accessed much faster because no mechanical disk needs to start spinning. Another benefit is that they consume less power and so extend the all important battery life.
So, if you want to easily “rejuvenate” your tired laptop, the best way is to simply update the HDD (top in picture) and replace it with an SSD (bottom in picture). SSD used to be expensive and of limited capacity but they have now come down in price (and can reach 1TB) because they are used in all laptops nowadays!
A small caveat though: your laptop needs to have a minimum spec: a dual core (Intel i5) processor preferably (instead of i3) and have 8GB of RAM memory (or capable of being upgraded to 8GB). Otherwise the base laptop is too old and not really suitable for modern computing.
I have performed this upgrade “procedure” many times before, and again last week-end. So, if you want to follow me through the physical upgrade (in my next posts), here is what I ordered online. You can of course select different brands and different size SSD but these are the ones I used:
- A 2.5″ SSD of the size you want – I used a 250GB Samsung 860 EVO one: £46.47 on Ebuyer.com
- A 2.5″ SATA hard drive USB 3.0 enclosure – I used a Sabrent one: £8.99 on Amazon.com
So in total, I spent a miserly £55.46 – about 1/10th of the price of a new mid-spec laptop.
Note: that the SSD must have enough capacity to cover, not necessarily the capacity of your laptop’s hard drive, but the amount of storage that you are currently using, plus a bit of extra room.
250GB was enough for me here, but you may want to go bigger, or store your seldom used data on the brand new “Free” USB drive that you will get at the end of this operation…
Of course, the trick is in being able to pull off the upgrade…
In my next post, I will explain how to clone the HDD.