How I sped up my 11 years old laptop with a SSD
I have a laptop, which was first introduced in 2008, and I still use it professionally.
It’s a Dell Latitude E6400, it runs Windows 7, has 4 GB of RAM and an Intel Core-2-Duo processor with 2.53 GHz. I use it for my work (I’m an independent/self-employed translator) and everything else, like surfing the internet, watching movies, listening to music.
With just Windows 7 it was actually quite fast after the operating system had booted and everything had finished loading (Windows 10, which uses more resources, would have been a different story). But the bottleneck was the hard drive and things slowed down when it was working.
So if I had to wait for the laptop, it was because it was loading software, like the browser or Microsoft Office. Also restarts, especially the shutting down phase, could take more than a minute. Just loading Windows from a cold start took like 35 secs, not too long, but everything adds up.
But then I had to install a professional translation software called MemoQ, which didn’t run on my Windows 7 32-bit, it needed the 64-bit version. So because I had to start from a blank formatted disc anyway to install Windows 7 64-bit, it was a good opportunity to install it on a new SSD and make my computer faster at the same time.
SSD is short for solid-state drive and the technology is similar to the chips in USB flash drives, but more advanced and with higher quality. They can be put in the same slot where the hard drive stays and replace it thereby.
SSDs are much faster, quieter and energy saving
Their main advantage is, that it’s much faster than a hard drive, like two times faster or more.
Another plus is, that they don’t have moving parts like a hard drive, which you will hear sometimes when something is loading. So they usually use less energy and are quieter.
That they use less energy is of course especially good in the case of a laptop, so you should normally have a longer battery time.
Until recently not so many laptops were fitted with a SSD because their main disadvantage was, that they were much more expensive per Gigabyte than hard drives. But this is changing and probably soon all new laptops will have SSDs fitted.
And if your laptop has a hard drive you can replace it with a SSD like I did. I opted for a Western Digital Green SSD with 240 GB for just $38 (or £29 in the UK).
This is not the fastest SSD available, because it focuses more on energy saving. But as it’s still a SSD it’s much faster than most hard drives. And I like the fact that it even saves more battery energy than other SSDs.
Now Windows starts almost twice as fast (approx. 20 secs instead of around 35), restarting is much faster too (especially because the shutdown time is now almost instant) and software and apps launch almost instantly.
This is with my Windows 7, but I’ve also often heard, that a SSD makes it possible to install Windows 10 on an old laptop like mine without slowing everything down to a crawl.
The main reason that Windows 10 usually runs slowly on old laptops is, that the hard drive is loading stuff too slow. This combined with a processor which is slow for today’s standards makes the computer not very usable. A SSD can remedy that and makes old PCs run Windows 10 with acceptable speed as long as you have at least 4GB of RAM.
Installation is quite straightforward, in most laptops you have to remove 3 or 4 screws, remove the hard drive out of its slot and slide the SSD in. Make sure that you buy a 2.5 inch SSD if your hard drive was also 2.5 inch (which is usually the case for laptops).
See here for an example installation guide, it will be similar for most laptops. Also make sure that AHCI mode is selected in the bios, so that the SSD is properly recognised as a drive in Windows.
Sometimes the SSD is not fixed strongly in place, because there is too much space, like in my case. Then just cut out some cardboard to secure it in place.
When you upgrade to an SSD, you have 2 options for installing Windows and your software and data on it: Install everything new from scratch, like I did, or clone your hard drive to the SSD.
For this you connect the SSD with an adapter or cartridge (UK version here) to an USB slot, which lets Windows recognise the SSD as an external drive and use clone software to copy the contents of your hard drive to the SSD (detailed instructions here).
Afterwards remove the hard drive, insert the SSD in its place and you can directly start Windows and all your apps and data will be there already. Finished.
Windows should recognise the drive automatically and use it properly as a SSD in place of a hard drive. So the user will have a C: drive like before, only much faster, quieter and energy saving.
Use old hard drive as external USB drive
Your old hard drive you can from now on use as an external drive for backup or storing movies and pictures etc. For this purpose I bought the cartridge mentioned above (UK version here), which lets you connect the drive to an USB port, making it a USB drive without need for additional power supply.
For optimal performance it is recommended to download the SSD management software from the manufacturer, in this case the Western Digital WD SSD Dashboard. If you have Windows 7, approximately once per week or at least once per month use the manual TRIM-function to clean the drive from trash data (the automatic TRIM option of this app doesn’t work in Windows 7, only in Windows 10). This ensures a longer life-time.
Theoretically you don’t actually need to use the app to execute the TRIM function, because normally Windows 7 and above should take care of this automatically. In my case I didn’t find this to be true, so I do it manually every now and then.
But it’s no big deal if you forget it for a few weeks, the drive will still work. And Windows 8 and 10 will take care of it automatically, the issue should only be with some Windows 7 installations.
SSDs don’t need to be defragged
Don’t however defrag the SSD, because SSDs don’t need to be defragged. Windows will turn off defragging automatically (confirmed in my Windows installation as well). If you defrag anyway it could shorten the life time of the SSD, because the more write actions, the shorter the life time.
Regarding the life time: Some people are concerned that SSD fail sooner than hard drives. This might have been the case in the early days of SSDs but shouldn’t be the case nowadays, confirmed by a long-term test conducted by Germany´s most respected IT and Computer magazine c´t and the Heise publishing company.
In the magazine´s test, they bought two SSDs from the 12 most popular products available in 2016 and tested each product for one year until the end of June 2017.
The outcome of the test conducted was astonishing: All of the disks tested were able to write more data onto their disks then was promised by the producer. Even cheaper disks were able to write more data than promised. The test clearly proves that the fear of a limited lifespan is highly exaggerated in most aspects.
Save time you never get back
And I have to say, having a SSD in the laptop feels like having a new laptop. I would say for everyday tasks like surfing, office work, watching videos there is barely a difference in speed now to a brand new laptop with a hard drive. Only for stuff like gaming you will still feel that the processor and the graphics card are not speedy enough.
It’s really enjoyable and I think the time you lose with a hard drive in comparison really adds up. With an SSD you can save time which you otherwise would never get back.
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