since9
Campaign Veteran
Years ago I heard an expression: "If your laptop is three years old, it's OLD. Get a new one."
Well, mine is twice that old:
HP
i5-3210M
8 GB DDR3
750 GB HDD
Windows 10
At least the operating system was the latest.
While there was nothing really wrong with it, the real-life MTBF for laptop HDD is about 6 years, so I was shooting 50-50. Rather than wait until failure was either imminent or an historical event, I decided to preempt it with one of the best upgrades you can do for your computer.
I bought a Samsung 860 EVO 1 TB for $150 on Amazon, my current HDD to the SSD last night using my $30 Insignia USB 3.0 Hard Disk Drive Enclosure (2.5" SATA), then shut down, swapped drives, and... Walla! 16 s boot time. 9x faster reads and writes. Loading pretty much any program is like, "Click... BOOM." And best of all, no more system slowdowns because the hard drive kept chugging along doing... SOMETHING. It was always hopping between 9% and sometimes 100% usage. Now it's around 1% to 2% unless a program is actively loading.
Overall, the system as a whole feels about 2-3 times faster. Highly recommended.
RAM is another area worth mentioning, but with 8 GB, I very rarely go above 6 GB. Usually I'm hovering between 3 and 5. Thus, if you have 4 GB, definitely upgrade to 8 GB, but if you have 8 GB, you won't see much improvement bumping things up to 12 GB or 16 GB unless you play a lot of high-end games which make extensive use of RAM.
Well, mine is twice that old:
HP
i5-3210M
8 GB DDR3
750 GB HDD
Windows 10
At least the operating system was the latest.
While there was nothing really wrong with it, the real-life MTBF for laptop HDD is about 6 years, so I was shooting 50-50. Rather than wait until failure was either imminent or an historical event, I decided to preempt it with one of the best upgrades you can do for your computer.
I bought a Samsung 860 EVO 1 TB for $150 on Amazon, my current HDD to the SSD last night using my $30 Insignia USB 3.0 Hard Disk Drive Enclosure (2.5" SATA), then shut down, swapped drives, and... Walla! 16 s boot time. 9x faster reads and writes. Loading pretty much any program is like, "Click... BOOM." And best of all, no more system slowdowns because the hard drive kept chugging along doing... SOMETHING. It was always hopping between 9% and sometimes 100% usage. Now it's around 1% to 2% unless a program is actively loading.
Overall, the system as a whole feels about 2-3 times faster. Highly recommended.
RAM is another area worth mentioning, but with 8 GB, I very rarely go above 6 GB. Usually I'm hovering between 3 and 5. Thus, if you have 4 GB, definitely upgrade to 8 GB, but if you have 8 GB, you won't see much improvement bumping things up to 12 GB or 16 GB unless you play a lot of high-end games which make extensive use of RAM.