Can I use new Kingston SSD with old Presario Desktop?

Hi, I'm Jewel with Kingston Technical Support and would like to offer our assistance. The SSD should work in any machine connected to a functional SATA II or SATA III port. To see if the SATA ports are working without having the drive connected you can also go to 'Device Manager' by right-clicking 'My Computer' and selecting the menu option 'Properties'. In the 'System Properties' box go to the 'Hardware' tab and there will be a button for 'Device Manager'. In 'Device Manager' look for a listing called 'IDE ATA/ATQAPI Controllers' hit the plus sign (+) next to it and see if there is a SATA controller listed. If there is then the SATA ports should be in working order. You may also try contacting HP/Compaq to see if they would be able to tell you if they are functional. A quick look on thier site I was able to find a this for the motherboard that should be in you SR1303wm http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en&docname=c00069442. It does list the 2 SATA ports as storage ports but that are SATA I ports meaning they run at 1.5Gbps. Our drives are SATA III (6.0Gbps) drives that are backwards compatible to SATA II (3.0Gbps). When it comes to SATA I the drives may work but it all depends on the computer it is connected to on whether or not it is able to negotiate the lower speed to access the drive. This would be true for the SR1575CL as well. The only way to see if it will work is to plug it in but the drive itself will not be assigned a drive letter and be seen in 'My Computer' until it has been formatted. You can go into Disk Management by right-clicking on 'My Computer' and selecting the menu option 'Manage'. This will open the 'Computer Management' window then on the left side click on 'Disk Management' which should be listed under 'Storage'. Then at the bottom half of the screen you should see a series of Disks. 'Disk 0' will typically be your operating system drive, 'CD-ROM 0' would indicate your CD/DVD drive, and and additional drives should be listed as 'Disk 1', 'Disk 2', etc. After connecting the SSD into the computer you can go into Disk Management to see if the drive is recognized. This works the same whether the drive is connected inside th computer or used with a USB enclosure. For further assistance, Please call us at 1-800-435-0640 (USA and Canada only) M - F 6am - 6pm PT and I or another available Technician will assist you. Please be sure to have the part in question on hand when you call.

Thank you for selecting Kingston as your upgrade partner.

I wouldn't upgrade such an old computer with a SSD. The performance gain will be really little, because the CPU is so slow in requesting data. I usually would upgrade with a with at least SATA II ports and 2-3 GHz and a dual core CPU.

You would need at least a SATA2 controller card to be certain the drive will work and having to use an adapter for an adapter usually doesn't work properly either. Doing so would require a lot of tinkering to get it going if it can get going. That being said, Windows XP does not support TRIM, which is a function that cleans up used sectors of the drive after the data has been "deleted" from the computer to keep the drive clean and running properly. The SSD itself does Garbage Collection but this function is limited and slow going. There are 3rd party utilities out there that would allow you to use TRIM on the drive but I cannot speak for their reliability. Considering both of your machines use a single-core processor, DDR memory, and do not have native SATA drivers, it is doubtful that it would be able to support an SSD even at SATA1 speeds.