If you want the most bang for your buck to speed up your netbook PC, like in my case, an Asus Eee PC netbook, then upgrade to an SSD (Solid State Drive). SSD’s replace your conventional hard drive.
Most netbooks and many notebooks come with underperforming 5400 rpm hard drives. Upgrading to an SSD will VASTLY improve performance since most Windows PC’s are slow due to a bottleneck reading and writing data to the hard drive.
SSD’s are like an SD card or USB stick in that they are just memory chips, no moving parts.
One key, though, is ‘garbage collection’. If you are not running Windows 7, then the ‘TRIM’ command is not supported. The exception, however, is when a vendor provides specific support for Vista or perhaps a garbage collection utility for Windows XP.
Bottom line is that if you don’t have Windows 7, do some checking to see who supports your operating system best. An SSD without TRIM or equivalent will slow down over time.
Here is a short video where I discuss how easy it is to upgrade to a SSD if you buy a ‘kit’ that includes an external enclosure and free disk cloning software.
SSD Upgrade Links
In the video above, I mention that I would include links for the netbook external USB CD/DVD drive that you need to boot the free cloning software from, and the SSD notebook upgrade ‘kit’ itself. Here they are:
External USB DVD drive for netbooks
Notebook SSD Upgrade Kit – The upgrade kit includes a simple external USB hard drive adapter with USB cable and a limited edition of Acronis True Image software to quickly clone the slow hard drive to the super fast SSD.
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