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Dell Latitude D830 SSD Upgrade

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:

  1. From the Logon Screen to Desktop after typing in your password is super fast (wow fast).

  2. 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.
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Comments

  1. JohnMcManus3 October 2011 at 00:20

    After logging onto my desktop this morning, I have just ordered a SSD for that too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. WebMinder20 August 2012 at 01:58

    Thanks for the post, this is quite encouraging! I have the same Dell and was wondering if an SSD will bring performance increase.

    ReplyDelete

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