I upgraded my second laptop today

I have 2 laptops- one is a Dell Latitude E6500 (business class laptop) with 2.53GHz core 2 duo processor, 7200 rpm WD hard drive and Windows Vista Business, the other is a small Toshiba ultraportable with 1.6GHz core 2 duo, 5400 rpm hard drive and Win 7.

A few months ago I bought a Samsung 128GB SSD and put into the Dell. The drive came with Norton Ghost and I used that to clone from the original drive to the SSD. I had some problems with the cloning and the boot loader got fubarred. I got some other programs that corrected the boot loader and I was up and running. The machine was pretty fast before except for Vista's slow boot times. The SSD sped up booting a little bit, to about 2/3 the time. It also sped up loading of apps.

Today I upgraded the little Toshiba with an Intel 320 80GB drive. Intel has their own version of Acronis Truimage that you can download for use with Intel drives. I downloaded it but it won't work if you are installing from a larger partition to a smaller partition. The original drive didn't have much data on it but I defragged it and Windows still wouldn't let me shrink the partition enough for the cloning. So I did some research and downloaded Easeus Total Backup and it did the cloning quickly and easily. I swapped drives and was up and running. Even though this machine had a slower drive to begin with, it still takes almost as long to boot. However once it is running it is much more responsive to use. Loading a web browser used to take a long time, now it is much faster. Calling up the list of saved bookmarks is faster, etc. I also use that machine to read large PDF's and those load very much faster. I have a 60MB PDF that took 8 sec. to load with the mechanical drive, it takes 3 sec. to load with the SSD. Overall it makes the computer feel like it has a much faster processor than it does. I think this is a good use for an SSD- upgrading a machine that seems marginally too slow. It makes the machine seem so much faster that it is a pleasure to use. And Easeus seems to be a very good product, plus it is free for home use.

My daughter and my wife both have slow laptops that now need to be upgraded, and my CAD workstation at work really needs to be upgraded.