Should I fit an SSD .... The Answer1

DrFarkoff

Grumpy Ole Git!!!
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I have a 10 year old Samsung NC10 or N110 netbook and it was just getting horrendously slow. I mean watch the paint dry slow!

So I started investigating how to speed it up and managed to locate and fit 2Gb RAM Memory, it helped "but" it was still slow

So I did some more digging and found out that the "defining specs" for a netbook are basically it's a small laptop with 2GB Ram maximum After 2Gb RAM it becomes a laptop apparently (from those in the PC business)

So I have a neat Well built Netbook and I could ride to Belfast and back before it completes an operation

I did not keep the Win10 OS that it had upgraded itself to many moons back Which If I had kept it it would have been a more equal test but it was still horrendously slow on Vista!!!!

But Bought Win 7 Pro (ISO) and licence off a legit seller and I bought a 120GB SSD I went for the Western Digital Green 120GB it had good write and read speeds and was not the most expensive in the world at £30 ish

Put it all together and launched the setup from a Microsoft application that allow you to boot and install the ISO from the USB


Result ??? Amazing! Much much quicker

Was it tedious ? Not really the ISO install from a USB is quite fast compared to the previous builds I did many moons ago for XP

What is laborious is doing the Updates and adding what you want

"But" once its built I will do another ISO of the disc before I use it :rob so that its al there
All I have to do is burn that to the disc and its all done in one shot "Except updates! :mad: "

So Yes for about £85 I have a fully usable netbook where I am sure of the build and no back doors!
 
Make sure auto defrag is turned off or your shiny new ssd won't last long. Win 7 can have an issue where sometimes it does not detect an SSD properly so fails to turn it off. It might have done it but worth checking just in case.
 
Did something similar several times

500gm ssd in one running Xp, 1 terabyte in other running win7.

The XP model is astoundingly fast. I use it most of the time, and the Win7 model for things it cannot run, which isn't much.

All in all, XP with 2gb ram and a Solid State Disk is, for me, the best all round combination I have used.
I find Win7 too slow and Win10 drives me crazy, a combination of slow speed and interminable upgrades which you cannot turn off. Also, I do not like Microsoft continually "sniffing" what I have on my computer.
Myke
 
I too am a big XP Pro fan the only sad thing is that I was recommended by a person who works in internet security for a large telecom company, that if I went for XP? Not to go on the internet as it was like a leaky sieve these days!
 
Yes XP on the internet is a no no as its to open to exploits given the lack of patches. SSD drives do help with speed and they make the battery last longer as there is no drive to spin round, cost wise a small drive can be picked up relativly cheaply helping an older system live longer so a win all round.


As to the netbook memory its a MS license qualification for the manufacturers as anything under 1.5 or 2GB of memory it was under the netbook umbrella and they didnt have to pay a license fee.
 
I have a little Dell notebook thingy which I quite liked as it was small but a fully functional PC.
Thought it was going in the bin because it was getting so slow.
Decided to see what I could do for not much money.
Bought an extra 2 GB of RAM taking it to 4GB.
Fitted a 128GB SSD.
Did a clean install of Windows 10.

What a cracking little machine it is now.
Boots up from cold in about 20 seconds.
 
I have installed Samsung SSD Cards in four of our computers here and it makes an enormous difference in speed, especially on older computers. Additional memory adds speed but nothing compared to an SSD card. Samsung provide free software to assist the migration from HDD to SSD Card. My only problem was I could not create a system image on my son's Lenovo laptop.

Grey Beard
 


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