Upgrade to SSD or new Laptop

hollie.weimeraner

I have a Dell XPS L501x that is about 6 or 7 years old and is frustratingly slow to boot at times running Windows 10 (it came with Win7). It has an Intel I7-740QM, 1.73, 6MB, CLF, B1 processor with a 1Tb SATA HDD with 4gb RAM. I'm thinking of upgrading to a Samsung 500Gb SSD and trying to work out if it's worth it. I don't use the laptop for any gaming and just use spreadsheets and webbrowsing along with my accounts package. Any thoughts please?

forgotmyname

Only you can decide if its worth swapping. It can make a big difference to boot times though.

Popped one into daughters laptop to show her how quickly it loads and i never got it back.

Head_The_Ball

hollie.weimeraner wrote: »

...I'm thinking of upgrading to a Samsung 500Gb SSD and trying to work out if it's worth it. I don't use the laptop for any gaming and just use spreadsheets and webbrowsing along with my accounts package. Any thoughts please?

An SSD will almost certainly be well worth it in terms of improving boot times. Having had an SSD equipped laptop for two years I would never go back to a conventional spinning disk hard drive.

Do you need as much as 500gb?

A smaller SSD will be much cheaper. My Windows10 laptop has a 120gb SSD and a second 1tb hard disk. The SSD has 42gb free. The laptop boots up in about 5 or 6 seconds.

If you need extra space, get an external USB caddy and mount your existing 1tb disk in that.

Or check if the laptop has a second disk slot and use that.

Head_The_Ball

Further to my above post, if your laptop has a DVD drive, you can replace that with a caddy for a 2nd SATA disk.

You could do that instead of using an external caddy as I suggested above.

They cost from about £5 on eBay, Amazon etc.

Here are some on eBay. Check Amazon and other sites too.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&_nkw=dvd+disk+caddy&_sop=12

Stoke

It makes a huge difference. Worth a punt.

hollie.weimeraner

Stoke wrote: »

It makes a huge difference. Worth a punt.

Punt taken:) Samsung EVO860 500 gb from Scan. £88 a lot cheaper than a new laptop

forgotmyname

Your going to hate how quickly it loads.

No longer will you be able to hit the power button then go and make a cuppa and come back before the login screen.

Owain_Moneysaver

SSDs are a lot more mechanically robust as well, which is much more of an issue on a laptop.

forgotmyname

Mechanically robust? There are no moving parts in an SSD so how is that comparable?

SSD's still fail. Find yourself some INTEL ones and just power the machine off and see your capacity drop to 8MB with all your data gone for good.

They can be fixed but 100% data loss.

motorguy

forgotmyname wrote: »

Mechanically robust? There are no moving parts in an SSD so how is that comparable?

SSD's still fail. Find yourself some INTEL ones and just power the machine off and see your capacity drop to 8MB with all your data gone for good.

They can be fixed but 100% data loss.

With so much free / very cheap cloud storage avail these days theres really no excuse for losing data.

EveryWhere

hollie.weimeraner wrote: »

Punt taken:) Samsung EVO860 500 gb from Scan. £88 a lot cheaper than a new laptop

How is it going? Will you run a clean install?