Hard drive or CPU

**handrawn** · 27 August 2020, 11:43 AM

it will increase access times - which is the equivalent of saying you have more lanes on your highway - but achievable speed is still depentant on traffic - bootup and response time should generally improve too

you can compare the way a computer processes information to the way a city handles traffic, there are fast roads, slow roads, clearways and bottlenecks, and it always depends on how many processes want to travel [ have access] at the same time - so the best I could say without knowledge of your computer and what is installed and how you use it is: it will maximise the theoretical speed your computer is capable of when swapping data in and out of memory and executing data transfers; it will also eliminate one pontntial source of mechanical failure and make the computer, if it is a laptop, safer to lug around [although nothing lasts for ever, but modern SSD's are good - get one that is larger than you need for system/storage within budget constraints so there is 'headroom', and buy a reputable make, I use samsung EVO]

all that said, if your computer is long in tooth seriously consider replacing it - yes a hasstle and expense, but consider it... windows 10 is becoming less forgiving of older hardware and that affects speed also... and it save you the bother of making the changes which is never 100% risk-free

if you store TB's of data though [external] HDD is still the way to go on grounds of cost

EDIT - when I upgraded my 2014 vintage HP Pavilion laptop two years ago, I experienced the imporvement that Paul has just indicated

**behzad** · 27 August 2020, 11:49 AM

Thank you everyone for the great advice. Possibly best to buy a new computer and retire this one https://support.hp.com/ca-en/document/c04285001
It has 8 G of Ram now on win 10.

**pauland** · 27 August 2020, 01:03 PM

Originally Posted by behzad

Thank you everyone for the great advice. Possibly best to buy a new computer and retire this one https://support.hp.com/ca-en/document/c04285001
It has 8 G of Ram now on win 10.

Wow an 11" screen!

My wife has a Dell laptop. It's long in the tooth ( DELL LATITUDE E5440, 2014? )
but an i5. I bought it second-hand.
She used to complain it was a bit slow. Then I put an SSD into it and she's not complained about it since. She also has a computer supplied from work, with a HD. She moans how slow it is.

SSDs are cheap for modest capacities.

**handrawn** · 27 August 2020, 01:15 PM

depends if you want to do the work to fit the SSD - not too bad spec-wise - my pavilion is a bit bigger, but the improvement was noticable

you can always remove the SSD if you decide on new computer later, put it in a caddy and use it as external

11 inch screen indeed, my eyes would cross ! - my pavilion is 15 inch and that's too small for most of what I do

**pauland** · 27 August 2020, 01:45 PM

This is *probably* representative of the work required to upgrade to an SSD. You will need to clone your HD to the SSD and you may run into issues with some copy protection schemes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd0HlIpcbL4

**handrawn** · 27 August 2020, 01:50 PM

good point - need to deactivate those programs that require it such as xara first, change of system drive equates to change of computer for these

**behzad** · 27 August 2020, 03:18 PM

Yes my only worries is the moving the programs, apparently crucial has it all figured out and takes you through it with their free software. I can also buy 500G for around $64 from them. I was going to buy a pc gaming computer this christmas or boxing day to run xara.