will a SSD solve my problems?

As you know from my other posts here, I have the really slow laptop. Sure, it's an i7, but it's an older i7. It's got 6gigs of RAM and didn't use to have any problems at all. All scans are clean, disk is 1% fragmented and it won't even let me defrag it. I'm running no extra services or anything. Lately, it's gotten to where I need to close Firefox multiple times every day because it's using all my memory and slowing everything down. Programs take awhile to load. The start menu sometimes I have to wait 20 seconds from when I click on it to when it opens. I use OpenOffice, and when I have a spreadsheet up, sometimes when I click it, I have to wait 20 seconds before it responds. Lately I've been thinking about getting a new computer, but I'd rather spend less and get an SDD. Everyone on the internet says SDDs handle all your problems, they get everything going fast again.

My Disk is often at 100%. When I close Firefox, which I do many times a day, it sits there and takes a while to close, and then after it finally stops running, Disk is at 100% for a while with Service Host: SysMain or System. Will SDD fix this or will it just give it more resources to use to 100%?

@ironfist, in general terms I'm going to agree with Fantail on this one, but there are a few things that you can do to ensure success.

I would suggest pressing ALT + CTRL +DEL and then choosing task manager. Go to the performance tab. Monitor both your memory usage and disk utilization, especially when things get particularly slow. You want to make sure that you are not simply starving your system of memory and that the bottleneck is indeed the disk.

If you are NOT pegging your memory usage but you DO see extremely high Active time and very slow Average response times on your disk, then you have a prime candidate for improving performance with an SSD.

Just from personal experience; I have an old laptop (guessing about 7 or 8 years old) where I replaced the HD with an SSD. That made a huge difference for me. The system is still no speed demon, but it helped a lot.

Another tip: If your laptop has an optical drive, you can also replace the optical drive with a HD. On my system, I replaced the physical HD with an SSD, making the SSD my boot device. I replaced the optical drive with a caddy designed specifically to fit in place of an optical drive. I put the original HD in that caddy. So now I have the speed of an SSD for the boot disk and an extra HD where I can store lots of large files.

Do you mean that your CPU is a 3630QM, not a 360QM??

The 3630QM is 8 year old technology; quad core; Passmark rating 5109; single thread Passmark rating 1670;

I don't know exactly what kind of load you are putting on the CPU, but it is no longer an upper level CPU, i7 or not.

Was it EVER significantly faster (in years past) when you asked it to do the same things you are asking it to do today?

Offhand, I'd guess you would be disappointed if you expected a major difference in performance with an SSD, other than in boot speed and to some extent in loading applications or doing disk intensive stuff like virus scans or backing up a bunch of files.

You need to confirm you have no hardware issues and no runaway processes or services.

ironfist said:

...I have to wait 20 seconds before it responds. Lately I've been thinking about getting a new computer, but I'd rather spend less and get an SDD... Will SDD fix this or will it just give it more resources to use to 100%?

If I were you, I'd clean install Win10, getting rid of all garbage which has made my PC slow.
What you describe is not normal and some expert members here can guide you to fix all your issues.

Really old PCs, having much older hardware than yours, are not behaving like yours. Your problem is not the HDD and of course an SSD should give wings to your PC given that you'll perform a clean install.

On your current HDD, you can try a Reset means you loose all apps, or a Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade keeping all your apps, means garbage too..., or a clean install means you start from the beggining which is the best solution.

Of course, you may wait for a few days when new Win 10 (v.2004) will be released and perform an upgrade which might help or a clean install which will help for sure. Buying a new PC is not a good idea. It's like you buy a new car because of bad spark plugs of your current.

Another idea, while you're waiting (if so) for Win 10 new release, is to open Task manager, go to Startup tab, disable all items you don't want to run when computer starts and restart to see if that helps. And of course, uninstall software you don't need, especially Antivirus (if you have more than one), games etc. Those are some of the many things you can do about your slow PC...

Hi,

I might be barking up the wrong tree here, but do you login to a MS account or are you using a local one? I know that Windows10 runs slow if you do not "Occationally" login to a verified account.

Therefore, if your on a local account, I suggest you login & verify your MS account on the PC & it should speed back up?

"and it won't even let me defrag it. "
Your basic problem is lack of HDD space. You have too much installed.
You should have a minimum of 20% free disc space for temporary files and for doing things like Defrag.

So when you buy a new drive it does not matter whether it is an SSD or HDD it has to be large enough. That is a very basic point, and then be in a position of not continuously worrying about that 20% of spare space.

"Everyone on the internet says SDDs handle all your problems"
That is nonsense as there is not even the basic consideration about Drive size, and in part the amount of RAM (lack of RAM means more swops to HDD/SSD, RAM is faster than SSD).

Assuming an a large enough drive, the only difference you will notice with an SSD is shorter loading times of an Application and slightly faster bootup time. Unless there is a lot of reading/writing to the Disc you won't see any difference.

Going back to April you asked the same question but still we do not know the basics of how full your HDD is. The numbers you gave then do not seem to add up.