Tag: SSD

Get a new, younger… computer! – 3

Part 3 – Swapping the hard drives

This is part 3 of my instructions for transforming your old laptop (or desktop) running Windows 7 into a Windows 10 version that works. Today we are going to perform the hardware related tasks.

Now unplug the USB external hard drive. Unplug the power from your laptop and turn it upside down so that you can see its back. You should see usually two separate covers, held by screws. One will let you access the memory, the other will let you access the hard disk. It this later that you need to open. Note that on some laptops, you remove the entire back cover to reveal all of the innards.

Tip: take a picture of the hard drive with your phone so you can remember how it was all setup. Unscrew and lift the HD end opposite the connector (with its anti-vibration protection if applicable – bright blue on picture). Then gently unplug the connecting cable to the hard drive (HD), noting which way the connector is lying. Remove the HD from the laptop, noting which way and how the connector is facing the cable.

Now install the new SSD in the place of the old HD (putting it first in the antivibration protection if applicable). Make sure the SSD is facing the same way as the old HD, so that the connector presents itself to the cable in the same way as the old one, gently connect the cable and push the SSD down in its location (or screw it in). Replace the cover on the back of the laptop.

Now try switching your laptop back on, and it should be the same as before, with Windows 7 , with no difference, except it was so much quicker to boot up! (and also closed down you will see).

This is one of the advantage of upgrading your disk drive is that you are not going to touch the old one. So should anything go wrong, all you need to do is pop the old drive back in, and you are back to where you started. So it is as risk-free as possible.

The other advantage of this setup is that at the end of the day, you can put the old HDD into the HDD case and can then use it as an external USB hard drive. A bonus for backing up data or for extra storage.

In my next post, I will explain how to upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 10.

Get a new, younger… computer! – 2

Part 2 – Cloning the HDD to the SSD

This is part 2 of my instructions for transforming your old laptop (or desktop) running Windows 7 into a Windows 10 version that works. Today we are going to prepare the new hard drive.

We purchased a 2.5″ HDD enclosure. Following the instructions that came with it, slide the plastic cover. Insert the new SSD, making sure its the right side up so that the connector engages properly. Replace the cover. You now have a new USB external drive that you can connect to your laptop using the USB cable supplied.

Connect it to one of the USB port of the laptop. Let windows 7 recognise the external hard drive and load the driver. When you can see the device, ensure that the SDD is formatted. If it isn’t, then go to “Computer Management” and “Storage” and format it.

Now download the “Samsung Data Migration Software for Consumer SSD” v3.1 from this site onto your laptop:

https://samsung-data-migration.software.informer.com/3.1/

Normally, as per their instructions, you would download it from the Samsung site:

https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools

But Samsung only has the new version 4.0 on their site at the moment, and it did not recognise my slightly “older” 860 serie SSD. This is a big miss by Samsung not to have left a link to v3.1! (how did I work that out? well experience from having done it before many times!)

Now use the software to clone your laptop’s hard drive onto the external USB drive, by following the instructions from Samsung. Note that you need to make sure that the USB drive has a larger capacity than the amount of data you are using on your laptop. If not, you need to remove some data files (music, video, photos) before performing the operation, or you should have bought a larger SSD !

https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/global.semi.static/Samsung_SSD_Data_Migration_User_Manual_(ENG)_v.3.1.pdf

  • Select the source disk: your laptop’s hard drive
  • Select the target disk: the USB drive
  • Press Start

This will take a little while, depending on how much data you have. It will effectively transfer everything from your laptop onto the USB drive, making it an exact copy (a clone).

In my next post, I will explain how to physically swap the hard drives in your computer.

Get a new, younger… computer! – 1

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.