Just Thought I'd Mention Something You May Find Helpful In The Future....

[ToraToraTora]

My disc drive packed up last week on an old Lenovo T410, nowt to write home about, anyway I bought a new solid state drive instead of the old style HDD. re installed the OS and wow it goes like *** off a shovel. Now I know it's down to the drive because I initially changed it for an HDD I had and that packed up after a fortnight so I bit the bullet and spent £50 on a SDD and wallop works great.

[237SJ]

I bought a new laptop a couple of months ago. Most of them have SSDs now. When my last laptop hard drive died, I nearly opted to replace it with a SSD but I didn't. Now I know why a SSD is so good. I would never go back to an HDD

[237SJ]

Another thing is, if you drop the laptop a SSD probably won`t break.

[Tilly2]

I wish I understood what this thread is about. :-)

[archibaldy]

I upgraded my desktop from HDD to SSD a few years ago, went from booting up in almost 3 mins down to around 20 seconds. I also kept my old HDD in there for putting downloads and videos etc. on to save space on the SSD. Well worth doing

[ToraToraTora]

tills it's the disc drive in your computer. HDD is the old style mechanical disc with moving parts, TBF a remarkable piece of engineering in it's modern form. However an SDD does the same but it is in fact memory chips that the OS thinks is a disc so files are stored and retrieved as if they are in fact memory, much much faster.

[alavahalf]

Did my desktop about 6 months ago .. boot time went from 1min 55 seconds to 9seconds.
Without doubt it is the best upgrade you could do to an older system !

[Sunk]

Well done.
I did that 8 years ago.

You need to ditch your Intel chips and get a PC running sh/t off a shovel M1 Apple silicon.
Twice as fast (as Intel) at half the energy usage.

(But I know that is not an option for you).

[ToraToraTora]

sunk I only did it because my HDD packed up and It wasn't so slow as to make me do something until I had to.

[Tilly2]

Thank you,T3 but all those abbreviations are way over my head.

HDD?
OS?
SDD?

[ToraToraTora]

HDD - Hard Disk Drive
SSD - Solid State Drive
OS - Operating System

[ToraToraTora]

apologies I said SDD when I meant SSD

[Togo]

I have, in the past upgraded my desktop with a hybrid and my old HP laptop with a hybrid. I have also done 2 laptops for friends. I used Hybrids because the 1Tb ssd drives were an astronomical price, but the hybrids were very cost effective. I also doubled the ram in my deskop and put a touch screen monitor with it. Everything flies and the laptop which I had to change the fan on some time back now runs cool as ya like. I also have a microsoft surface pro which is like witchcraft that I take with me when I am mobile. Just a point. When I built the desktop way back when I over specced everything and put the best motherboard there was on the market at the time , and put in a power supply that would power our street lights. The same specifications now would cost me a pretty penny. Last time I looked about a grand. I also cloned all the hard drives to the new drives that I installed so that no files were lost and all settings remained. It was interesting.

[Sunk]

I had important data which was archived to an external HD. I changed that to a SSD because it was safer. I partition that and had put Windows OS on that which booted up super super fast.
So I replaced the HD on my Mac to a SSD just for the speed improvement, and my productivity.

Apple Silicon is going to be a game changer. I don’t have one yet, but they are very very good.

[alavahalf]

Here we all are, pleased as Punch with our SSD's and the game has already been upped to M2 drives, which make the SSD's look slow !

https://www.novatech.co.uk/products/crucial-mx500-1tb-m-2-sata-6gbs-internal-solid-state-drive-retail/ct1000mx500ssd4.html

Togo.. the price of a 1tb SSD has done nothing but tumble.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Crucial-MX500-1TB-SSD-/362712751094

[barry1010]

I changed to SSD a few years ago, I would advise everyone to do it, it is quite easy

[Togo]

I knew that the price was down Al, it was bound to happen. At the time that I needed then an ssd with the right specs would have been about 4 times as much as the one you are showing and I was picking up the hybrids for about 40 quid. If I ever have to sort another lappie out I will obviously be using the ssd option. It is something I do keep my eye on. Have a look at this Alava and look at how the price leaps up with increased capacity and but not always faster write speed. The gamers love em.

Amazon.co.uk User Recommendation

[barry1010]

If your machine can use more RAM than it has - upgrade it. Cheap, quick, easy and makes a huge difference.

[Sunk]

When buying a new computer you should max out the ram then. Adding more ram near to the end of its life is a false economy. Save your pennies for your next purchase.

[barry1010]

It's worth doing at any time, RAM is so cheap now and PCs last a lot longer than they used to. I agree the earlier the better but any time is good.