If you already have all the RAM your PC needs and it still seems slow, chances are that your PC would speed up considerably with an SSD upgrade replacing your traditional SATA hard drive.
With Windows XP or Windows 7, make sure you have at least 2GB of RAM, if not, check out a RAM upgrade here.
After that, though, the reason your PC is slow – evidenced by the continual blinking or solid display of the hard drive activity light, is that the hard drive is the performance bottleneck in your PC.
Many PC’s come with el-cheap-o 5400 rpm hard drives or even the newer “green” hard drives that are slower than the 7200rpm drives guys like me have been installing or specifying in PC’s for years. The manufacturer saves money, you pay a few dollars less, then you pay with POOR PERFORMANCE the entire life of the PC.
But that’s OK, the PC manufacturers know that it will be all the sooner that you will be coming back for another new PC that way!
Get Top Performance From Your PC With An SSD
With an SSD replacing your traditional hard drive, you will get the most speed your machine is capable of. SSD’s do need support for the “TRIM” command to work best, however, and not slow down over time.
You need Windows 7 for that, XP just does not support it. Some SSD’s come with special “garbage” collection tools for use with Windows XP, but that’s a pain.
Note: I am actually advocating replacing hard drives in BRAND NEW PC’s with SSD’s for maximum performance. In a desktop PC, that can even leave you with a 2nd hard drive, the original, for other purposes.
How To Upgrade A Desktop PC With An SSD – Video
Upgrade to An SSD Right Now
Reasonably priced SSD’s are typically under 100GB in size. Don’t fret. Most people, and certainly most business workstations can easily get by on that.
If you cannot get by on that, then use the SSD for your Boot/Windows/Programs drive for lightning fast Windows response, gaming, and even business applications. Use your traditional hard drive that may be 250 – 500GB as a 2nd drive in a desktop PC and put your data there.
Better yet, though, move to a home network attached storage unit (home NAS) to share files among all computers (PC’s & Mac’s) in the house, protect the files with NAS RAID and even backup to an online backup service.
If you have a laptop, your old hard drive can go into a USB hard drive enclosure or even into a NAS unit.
Here is the Kingston SSDNow 64GB SSD upgrade bundle seen in the video.
Thanks alot, I was thinking of upgrading to SSD but was a little put off by the size. The games i play are usually 12 gig’s or more, I never thought of using running my 1TB SATA as a secondary storage unit. Great tip.