Slow computers

[Nick29]

If you were given a £150 gift voucher to spend on your computer to make it faster (and nothing else), what would you spend it on ?

I think many of us would maybe dash out and buy a more powerful processor, or maybe some faster memory, but how many would spend money on the real 'bottleneck creator' ?  The hard drive.

I'd forgotten just how much a hard drive can slow a computer down until recently.  Some time ago I installed a Solid State Hard Drive as my C: drive so that my computer would boot up faster, but until recently I'd forgotten just how much it was speeding things up.  When I originally installed the SSD, the prices were still quite high, and I could only afford a 64GB drive.  Despite my best efforts to keep stuff off the C: drive, it eventually filled up, and not being in the position to find the money for a bigger SSD, I re-installed a conventional hard drive.  Only then did I realise just how SLOW this would make my PC become !

After a couple of days of 'plodding programs' which were driving me to distraction, I could stand it no more, and I have invested in a 256GB SSD.  It wasn't just the initial bootup of Windows that was being speeded up - it was the loading of programs like Thunderbird, Google Chrome, even individual web pages were taking longer to load with a mechanical drive.

Of course the  downside of SSDs is that they tend to fail more catastrophically than conventional drives, but I keep regular backups, so hopefully I won't be too inconvenienced when it happens 

[suein10b]

Id up the memory from 8gb to 16gb and get an ssd

[trystan]

The interesting thing about SSD drives is that they have a shorter lifespan. This is because the silicon can only be written-to so many times before they 'wear out' electrically. When these do 'wear out' though, it just means that these parts can't we written to, but can still be read so the drive becomes 'read only', but with the data on there intact.

Despite the shorter lifespan, they are less likely to fail in situations where your computer gets knocks and bangs or has large swings in temperature (perhaps a laptop, or a PC that's lugged about everywhere, or perhaps a PC in a conservatory).

The final thing to remember is that the lifespan of SSD exceed the number of years people on average keep a PC / Laptop before upgrading anyhow.

Adding an SSD is a great way to boost a computer's performance. The machine I'm using right now is running on one and it's already typed this message for me (ok, so perhaps it didn't).

Trystan