All news to me and sounds very interesting also I think I've seen something about undoing the underside of a laptop and inserting something on YouTube. Is there a price range and what's the best one say on Amazon as it will show a pic of it and the price ?
What were your previous times ?
A Samsung 500GB SSD cost about £150 in the UK.
My Windows boot times went from 90s to about 7s after I upgraded to an SSD. And have not experienced any desktop lag ever since.
Prices fall dramatically if you can manage with a smaller drive. I fitted a 250Gb Crucial drive almost 2yrs ago now and it was around £60 or under from a company called CPC which is part of Farnell, a major electronics wholesaler to the industry.
Replacement on my Dell consisted of undoing a couple of screws to remove the cover, four screws to free the drive which then just pushes away from its socket and is then free. Swap the Dell specific bracket from the old drive to the new and replace. All the screw holes and fittings as far as I know are standard i.e. they would transfer to any make/model of suitable drive.
Always remove the battery and any leads (power adapter etc) before doing anything like this.
As an example.
All looks pretty straightforward thanks for the link.
Looking to spend around £50 - £75 so unless there's better choices and deals elsewhere Argos as usual have quite a lot on offer, also I think they refund you within a short period if unsatisfied though I'd have to check this first. I think they might even fit it as well so is it worth keeping the old drive just in case there's any problems later on ?
There's one with 2 terabytes (No:73) for £69.99 plus vat which looks ok but is this an SSD i.e. the better one of the two ?
Buy Hard drives at Argos.co.uk - Your Online Shop for Technology.
No, those are portable hard drives, which are connected to your computer by USB. The driver use 5200-5400rpm low power hard drives.
Like these (example)
MX300 275GB 2.5 SATA 6Gb/s SSD - CRUCIAL MEMORY | CPC
Thanks all new territory ! How much do you think would the MX300 275GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s SSD in the pic reduce the start up times by say from the current slow 50 - 60 secs ? Also does it make everything else much quicker as well ?
That SSD was just an example, there are countless others available.
YouTube video showing how to replace on the Lenovo:
lenovo G50 HDD - Bing video
'Everything else' is certainly much (as in light years) quicker. Programs open instantly, nothing seems to get bogged down etc.
Start up times in all honesty were always fairly good even with the traditional drive (it was a 7200rpm high performance one though).
In your case it would be interesting to try a 'clean install' of Windows which removes all the bloat, however I would also normally recommend anyone to make a disk image of their present set up first so that things can always be put back if you ran into trouble.
There are lots of videos around that show SDD vs HDD so you can see the differences.
The attached file (super low resolution to fit on here) shows my laptop when I had W8.1 and a traditional drive fitted. You'll probably think that seems fast and it shows start up, opening an email in Internet Explorer and arriving on a forum. The SSD is quicker still but where it really shines is in actually doing stuff.
That's impressive indeed thanks the videos making it much easier to follow. I take your point about doing a clean install and removing old bloat first, though I wouldn't dare do it myself as I'd have no idea what was happening then see what the situation is. Is it a long job ?
Then as I bought it from PC World last March for £299.99 and if it doesn't take too long to do rather than leaving it with them, as a first step I'd like to get them to do the clean install even though the warranty or whatever has run out then note any differences.
If it's still slow then to buy the one in your link....?
MX300 275GB 2.5 SATA 6Gb/s SSD - CRUCIAL MEMORY | CPC
Btw Is mine a mechanical one - an HDD ?
A clean install usually only takes around 20 to 40 minutes depending how fast your PC is.
This explains how its done in detail although in essence all you do is create a Windows 10 installation file on a plug in memory stick, set the PC to boot from that stick (which means it looks to that first and takes its instructions from there), and then proceed with the installation.
This shows it in detail:
Clean Install Windows 10 Windows 10 Installation Upgrade Tutorials
A clean install formats and wipes the HDD and there is no going back once that happens. As long as you have access to another PC in case you needed to check or look something up then I would say you shouldn't have any major problems. Clean installing and formatting the drive means you lose everything that was ever installed. You can never get that stuff back, which most think is a bonus :)
Quote
