Slow Laptop Syndrome
I have a LATITUDE D830 : INTEL CORE 2 DUO T7500 4GB Ram from 2008, I did get a fairly high specification at the time, so it has always had pretty decent performance. However I haven't been using it for a while and when I did it seemed slow compared to my Core 5i desktop computer. (I use Windows 7 ultimate with the latest updates)
Laptop for Work
Now I might be doing a fair bit of travelling to customer sites in the near future and the last thing I want is a poorly performing Laptop, so I decide to ditch all the crap I had on it like iTunes, movies, miscellaneous software and cut back to a basic "work" PC. After all I do have iPhone, iPad and new kindle (soon) for all my multi media needs.
I purchased a "Corsair 120GB Force 3 SSD 2.5" SATA-III 6Gb/s Read = 550MB/s, Write = 510MB/s" from ebuyer.com. Now I am guessing that SATA-II rather that SATA-III on the system board, but the price difference between SATA-II and SATA-III was nothing really, so I just took the SATA-III options.
Timings
Prior to the Upgrade
- To Boot to Logon Screen : 43 seconds
- To Get Logged on : 70 seconds
After Upgrade
- To Boot to Logon Screen: 22
- To Get Logged on :30
SSD for work Laptop
Now that I have the essentials loaded for hitting the road:
- Office
- Visio
- Live Email
- Chrome
- SecureCRT
- Pokerstars
- Dropbox
- Kindle
- Acrobat
- Security Essentials
- Skype
- vSphere Client
- Live Mesh Documents Synced
I have used about 37Gb of the Drive, so still lots of space for more utilities.
Two things now stand out about the performance:
- From the Logon Screen to Desktop after typing in your password is super fast (wow fast).
- The general overall performance is very smooth.
So having done this upgrade I need to seriously consider a similarly task for my Desktop, but i don't know if I can be bothered with the pain of splitting my application and data across two drives SSD = application HDD= application data + media.
Bottom Line
If you use a laptop for work and need it to perform efficiently, having an SDD will go a long way to help.
After logging onto my desktop this morning, I have just ordered a SSD for that too.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post, this is quite encouraging! I have the same Dell and was wondering if an SSD will bring performance increase.
ReplyDelete