SSD Performance increase

[anonymous-user]

I have a 5 year old Dell desktop which is now not in use because I have upgraded to a new XPS but we need a new household computer and I was wondering if the desktop with an SSD upgrade would be significantly faster after the change?

The other option is buying a new laptop/desktop to fill the void but having move to SSD on my XPS I can't imagine going back to spinning disks.

Also, I am fairly ok with computers but I have never done a windows install from scratch. Is this just going to be a major stshow? I also don't have a copy of windows, although it has a licence. Where do I get one?

Any advice would be great.

Edited by anonymous-user on Monday 31st August 13:18

[beanbag]

bulldong said:

I have a 5 year old Dell desktop which is now not in use because I have upgraded to a new XPS but we need a new household computer and I was wondering if the desktop with an SSD upgrade would be significantly faster after the change?

The other option is buying a new laptop/desktop to fill the void but having move to SSD on my XPS I can't imagine going back to spinning disks.

Also, I am fairly ok with computers but I have never done a windows install from scratch. Is this just going to be a major stshow? I also don't have a copy of windows, although it has a licence. Where do I get one?

Any advice would be great.

Edited by bulldong on Monday 31st August 13:18

It'll be massively quicker! I did the upgrade on my Windows media server system running Windows 7 (now 10), and it's lightning fast. Reboots take about a minute, whereas before they took about 3-4 minutes. Also, general encoding, indexing and responsiveness is much better. Worth every penny.

Upgrading is very easy but you need a little technical know-how.

I bought a Transcend drive and it came with a cloning tool. Simply plug in the new drive alongside the old one and run the tool. It'll clone the old drive, and expand or reduce the partition if needed.

You may need the original Windows boot DVD to activate the new partition but the cloning tool should do this for you.

[Farmerpalmer]

just upgraded my old desktop with a samsung evo 850 ssd (pc world have an offer on).also has a 5 year warranty
boot up used to take forever - now 60 seconds.
Samsung also have samsung magician software which can optimise /speedup the drive further.

fantastic increase in performance - has saved me from upgrading the whole machine

[jimmyjimjim]

Just upgraded the Wife's laptop with a Samsung 850 Evo (microcenter had a deal on). Power on to outlook running and reading email now about 30 seconds. Well worth it.

It comes with a clone utility. you don't need anything else apart from a sata cable:

Plug in new drive,
Power up, let windows detect it,
Install Samsung clone utility from the CD,
Clone away,
Power down, put new SSD in place of old HDD,
Power up.

[andy-xr]

Older laptops can be a false economy upgrading them though, if they'll take 4+ Gb RAM then it's worth it, but I've got an old Compaq sat here with a stty processor and while it'd benefit from an SSD compared to what it's got now, it wont take more than 2GB RAM so will still be slow on certain programs no matter where they're launched from

[Mr Pointy]

I've just upgraded a Dell laptop to an SSD & I would say it's very well worth while doing with start up & shut down being much quicker. As your machine is a Dell as well it may well have the means to burn recovery media so be a bit careful about how you make the changeover or you may lose this ability on the new disc.

The biggest issue I found was finding decent cloning software. The original hard drive had four partitions with an OEM & a Restore partition as well as the OS & a Data partition. Both the Samsung software & EaseUs were dismal as they couldn't perform the simple task of replicating the entire disc and/or would leave the disc unbootable until a Windows repair was run. I finally found Macrium Reflect & can recommend it as it's easy to use & produced a working clone first time.

http://www.macrium.com/

The free version is quite adequate for SSD migration.

[wjwren]

Well worth it. Ive had an SSD for about 5 years now and just upgraded to the latest Samsung 1tb pro series which is a fair bit quicker than my old 120gb OCZ, which still wasnt slow.
I wouldnt use a laptop or PC without one now.
Ive just put my old OCZ in my girlfriends ageing Dell Vista machine and that's made it quick.
You can get a 120gb for about £40 so no brainer.

[Pentoman]

Yeah, do it. You can move your OS and everything (I used EaseUS ToDo backup - free which mostly worked).

[Podie]

The Crucial SSDs have an option for a backup kit (essentially Acromis) which makes things nice and easy.

[red_slr]

You will notice a good improvement. Things like IE / Word etc will launch much quicker. Windows updates will also be quicker. You may not notice a difference in things like video coding or any other CPU related stuff.

[CubanPete]

Best upgrade I have ever done.

[anonymous-user]

Thanks everyone. I've ordered a 500gb ssd from crucial and have upgraded the machine in its current guise to windows 10 and made a windows 10 USB key. I have the key for windows 10 which I got using magic jelly bean key finder. I will boot from the USB when the ssd is installed. This is all in theory until it's working :-)

[anonymous-user]

SSD now installed and cloned. In the end it was super simple. Did a fresh install of windows 10 on the old HDD, plugged in the ssd and cloned the HDD using the clone programme that the crucial ssd comes with. Cloned it, shut down, unplug hdd, boot. Voila.