The single, only, greatest upgrade you can give your older machine is a solid state drive. Fact. (Providing you are running at least Windows 7 – more on that later.
What are Solid State Drives (SSDs)? SSDs share more in common with the USB stick you keep your files on between machines, than the old magnetic drives that used to be common place, and are still used when size is more important than speed. Inside these super light, 2.5in wide boxes are millions of switches representing the 1’s and 0’s that make up the code of everything on your PC. (A bit over simplified but the full details would make for even more boring reading!)
Where the old HDD would physically change the magnetic medium on its disc, using a mechanical drive head, an SSD controller tracks where files are stored and can access them immediately, meaning that drop that killed your laptop, or having a full drive slowing your machine is a thing of the past!
Now of course, spinning discs are still cheaper than the flash used in SSDs, however those prices are falling as they become more commonplace, which brings me onto the point of this article…
I spend a lot of time recommending, restoring to and fitting SSDs. Many older laptops came with spinning drives which were fine on older operating systems, but as program and data sizes have got bigger, the speeds of these drives cannot keep up. An SSD can make an older machine feel brand new as the PC responds in mere seconds rather than minutes. Documents, programs, pictures, even webpages load faster, and the machine boots in average 15 seconds.
A wild SSD in it’s natural habitat.
The replacement is fairly simple for any competent tech or hobbyist, and transfers by a professional are without risk ensuring that appropriate backups are taken, (which at Retrodex we always do before ANY data transfer). The difference is night and day! (Just look at the Facebook reviews!
The best bit with proper SSD selection? If you drop a laptop and it’s fitted with a HDD, you can pretty much kiss your data goodbye as the drive head smashes into the platter. With an SSD? worst case scenario you know the drive into read-only mode where the data can still be recovered onto a new drive. This even applies as the drive gets too old and it locks itself out to allow you to recover onto a new drive preventing data loss! Obviously this isn’t a replacement for proper data husbandry… but that another conversation for another time! Don’t want to blow my wad all in one blog now do I?
Until next time everyone!
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