Replaced my Dell E6510's hard drive with a Crucial M4 512Gb SSD and it really flies now. Apps like Photoshop Elements that previously took up to a minute to load now appear in about 5 seconds.

Another thing I've noticed is that the boot process pushes the processor a lot harder. I think the hard drive was a bit of a bottleneck and that has shifted more to the processor.

Hopefully will get a bit more life out of the battery too.

Oh flipping heck - title should read Laptop Flies!

Edited

I've been running a Corsair F120 in my Asus X72 since I bought it last year. I've got an identical F120 in my Toughbook and an Intel SSD in my desktop. IMHO a computer is unusable unless it has an SSD drive. I so used to it that it bugs the hell out of me to use a computer with a normal mechanical drive.

But you do have a point. My SSD kick the cpu up a bit too. Nothing noticeable however. Only reason I know is that I have the TB widget active.

I'm actually thinking of installing another SSD in my laptop as a scratch disk instead of the 7200rpm 500gb drive. I've got plenty of ram, but it feels sluggish sometimes.

512Gb !! I bet that cost a bit.

My tosh laptop has 2 HDD, so i replaced the boot drive with a 128Gb SSD, put W7 and all my big apps on it.

It's great, I love it.

I have an 128GB Kingston unit in my old Pentium D machine about 18 months ago, and that gave the machine a new lease of life. I retained a 750GB disk for data / pictures / etc. Coupled with 6GB w7 seems happy enough, shame as I can't justify a new icore 7 beast now :-(

The first thing I did after buying my 901 netbook was rip out the old slow SSD and stick in a new, fast one, it makes a huge difference; now the cpu is the bottleneck!!!!

New lease of life ? Certainly. I reckon another 18-24 months out of my Tosh Satellite Pro, Cheaper than buying a new high end laptop.

I got a Mushkin Chronos SATA 3 120GB for about £99 from Aria. Seems fast enough, I'm sure there are better SSDs out there

Might be a bit late, but I hope you checked the firmware and put the latest version on before you formatted. Someone at work bought one of these when they first came out, the original firmware had a bug which (if I remember the details correctly) would cause a crash once an hour, once the drive reached ~5200 hours powered on. Yes, with an average 8 hour workday that's two years, but if I bought an expensive 512GB SSD then I'd want a lot more than 2 years use from it!

Might be a bit late, but I hope you checked the firmware and put the latest version on before you formatted.

Checked the firmware first - it had the latest version on when it arrived. I think, even if you had the firmware bug, updating it will fix the issue as firmware updates don't affect stored data.

I also got an SSD for my netbook. Really has made a difference. Only a 128gb one though. Was nice anc cheap as it's a Samsung one but HP branded. Updated to the generic samsung firmware that supports TRIM and it's been fine.

Feel like getting one for the PC at some point too.

Phil

I fitted the Crucial M4, but 128mb to my 13" MacBook Pro. I also threw 8GB ram at it as well. It really does fly now.

I have enabled TRIM via the well documented hack.

Loads OSX lion, word, excel, aperture, mail, iTunes, Calendar, preview & safari in about 45 seconds from pushing the power button.

It does do one peculiar thing though......when using it with a client, sometimes it will go to sleep just before I want to use it again. I tap any key to wake it up, and it can take ages to come back to life. It is fine if it is left for a while and then woken up.

I am on my original battery, and it lasts me about 5 hours of use per day. The laptop is about 2 3/4 years old now.

I was going to change it for the latest 15" laptop, but these upgrades has given it a new lease of life for another year or two. I also gave it a second hand LED 24' apple cinema screen which makes working from my office very pleasant.

The only reason I would upgrade is to get a faster processor with dedicated video memory, as I am now using video much more, and editing movies can take hours to process, using my Core 2 Duo processor.

I put a 60gb into the desktop for the OS and a 1tb raid for everything else. Boot times and loading program's have improved dramatically. I've got some problem with the general set up as things install on the SSD despite trying to put it on the raid. Mine also can be slow when 'waking' if it's been sitting dormant awhile, may just be a setting though

I put a 60gb into the desktop for the OS and a 1tb raid for everything else. Boot times and loading program's have improved dramatically. I've got some problem with the general set up as things install on the SSD despite trying to put it on the raid. Mine also can be slow when 'waking' if it's been sitting dormant awhile, may just be a setting though

That might just be a case of waiting for the disks in your raid to spin up - when do you keep your hibernation file?

I had 3 x 60Gb OCZ Vertex 2E's in RAID-0.

Now, THAT was fast. 750Mb/s read/writes. However, useless on a motherboard RAID controller (fake RAID) and I couldnt afford a proper RAID controller.

Now I've got 2 Corsair Force GT models (60Gb and 120Gb) and they're 500Mb/s r/w each on their own.

Very nice.

Want one for my laptop next...

That might just be a case of waiting for the disks in your raid to spin up - when do you keep your hibernation file?

Hibernation file is always on the OS drive, it can't be moved.

Hibernation is always turned off on my machine! As is the page file. With 16GB RAM, who needs a page file....

Hibernation file is always on the OS drive, it can't be moved.

I suspected as much, but have never researched it.

Hibernation is always turned off on my machine! As is the page file. With 16GB RAM, who needs a page file....

No page file = no dump file if the machine BSoD, iirc....

The dumps are useless anyway, realistically though. I certainly wouldn't use it as a reason to keep a page file around if that was all I could think of.

Maybe not on a desktop machine, bit if you have say an unstable server then it certainly might be handy, assuming you know what to do with the dump files it generates.

I have one server work (located on a remote site), which BSoD when I try and bring up a remote desktop connection to it using the /admin switch, but I don't use /admin it is fine......

Maybe not on a desktop machine, bit if you have say an unstable server then it certainly might be handy, assuming you know what to do with the dump files it generates.

I have one server work (located on a remote site), which BSoD when I try and bring up a remote desktop connection to it using the /admin switch, but I don't use /admin it is fine......

What does it blue screen with?

What does it blue screen with?

No idea, as it is on a remote site. I asked the IS staff on site to look at it, and they never got back to me. Once I realised I was the cause of is reboot cycle I stopped logging in with the /admin switch. When I finish this week of nights, I'll chase up the person who was meant to be looking into it and see if they have sorted it out yet.

No page file = no dump file if the machine BSoD, iirc....

Quite right, but my machine never BSoD's.

Hibernation is always turned off on my machine! As is the page file. With 16GB RAM, who needs a page file....

Errr, you still need a swap/page file on the hard drive. The OS will stil utilise it even if you do have that much RAM.

Quite right, but my machine never BSoD's.

And this is different, IIRC. Depending on how Windows is configured, not much is dumped *by default* aside from "mini dumps". You can configure it to leave behind a memory dump, and when configured a BSoD will leave behind a MEMORY.DMP file which can then be analysed by tools like WinDbg.

Edited 12 April, 201214 yr by George512