Cons29 said:
ssd is definitely faster, it will make things snappy.
i am not too sure about using an external hdd, it would be tedious if it was me, if at all feasible.
sorry if i am not much help, this is the main reason i dont like laptops, upgrades are sooo limited. Most of the time, just ram and HDD. It's hot, and if you buy a new one, you wont get to reuse almost everything, no reusing the monitor, case, even the keyboard
Haha no problem and I definitely know your meaning. I have really been wanting to upgrade the processor and annoys me alot that I can't but nothing I can do about it but upgrade the things I can upgrade.
counterc said:
I hope this help you out a little. First of all I know exactly what you are going through because i did exactly what you are considering doing. So let me go through this 1 step at a time and answer your questions as you posted them.
1. I doubt your problem is as stated above. When i had similar issues with my laptop it turned out to be a crappy Windows Vista (with all of the added bloatware that comes with a new laptop) and the fact that my machine had only 2 gigs of memory.
2. If you have at least 4 gigs of system memory you will see a huge improvement with how your machine responds. This does not do anything thing for your gaming graphics but you will notice improved start up and shutdown times as well as faster loading applications.
3. You absolutely can keep you old drive and use it as an external drive for storing things. The internal drive is just a smaller than your larger desktop drives and when placed in a good enclosure they work just fine and you don't have to handle them with kid gloves. I don't suggest tossing it across the room but it will be just fine for everyday use.
4. If it were me I would not even consider one of the Samsung SSD for your laptop. Although they are amazing drives what you are really paying for is the speed they offer. I would go with a drive that is larger in size and not worry about the fastest drive on the market. Remember you are on SATA ll and you are only going to get so much out of that controller so the Samsung seems like over kill. With that being said, it really depends on how soon you plan on getting a new laptop. A lot of the newer laptops are moving toward the smaller MLC drives so if you don't plan on upgrading for a couple of years yet the laptops you buy down the road might not even take the larger SSD drives. 128 gigs is not a lot of room for a laptop if you are going to be playing games. Most all of your good SSD makers have pretty good warranties and the MTFB is so high that buying the more expensive Samsung just does not seem worth it unless it proves to be the better price to performance winner.
As i stated before, I had a laptop that was almost useless to me but after spending a little money on memory, a copy of Windows 7 and an SSD it has become a real workhorse.
Good luck and I hope I help at least a little bit.
Hey counterc. Thanks for your reply. Yes your answer helps but I guess I should have said in my original post that I have 4 GB RAM so it should not be causing any problems for what I am doing since I rarely have very large programs open together. My processor refuses to handle that scenario
![:p :p]()
. I'll respond in a similar fashion:
1. I am running Windows 8 although I was on Windows 7 for 2.5 years and like I said above 4GB of ram seemed plenty to me. I thought the extremely high seek times of my HDD (they go from like 0 - 100ms to 10k ms + during a slowdown) was for sure the reason but if it IS the ram than I can upgrade for a lot cheaper. So is there anyway to test that it is actually the RAM?
2. I guess this is irrelevant since you don't think the HDD is the issue. I'll move on.
3. OK great! That makes life easier.
4. Well like I said I want this upgrade to matter in the future. The next laptop will hopefully be SATA III so I am not worried about this not being able to max out the speeds. As for the capacity... I don't usually have more then 3 or 4 games at once because I just don't need it. Once I finish a campaign I get rid of it. For multiplayer I play League of Legends or WoW and soon the new CnC when it is finally released. Because of this I have never used more than 90GB and I'm actually using 50GB at the moment. So if you are saying go for a larger SSD, than i don't need it. I want rock solid reliability which from I've read is what Samsung 840's offer. I just need to know 840 EVO vs 840 PRO. Which is like sturdier is my question. Since I won't need TOP speeds the question I have is if the 2 year extra warranty on the 840 PRO is worth it or if the EVO is just as likely to last 5 years.