Old Laptops Become Usable Again With SSDs
Breathe some new life into your notebook with an SSD.
While we continue to covet the latest and greatest CPU and GPU at the top of computer parts most valuable for upgrades, SSDs could actually be the part that most significant in real world gains – especially for one currently sitting with older hard disk drive technology.
SSD maker RunCore had a CES booth with an interesting concept, where older laptops were outfitted with SSDs that transformed them to once-again usable machines. Included in the demonstration were a Dell Inspiron laptop with Intel Centrino, which includes a Pentium M CPU and an Asus Eee PC 900.
Both machines scored fairly low overall Windows Experience Indexes, with the Dell pulling in a 1.0 and the Asus a 2.1, but both scored outstanding hard disk scores of at least 6.8 thanks to the SSD.
Ars Technica described the SSD-equipped old-timers as "running Windows 7 like champions." But of course, such an upgrade would only make sense if the cost of the SSD weren't expensive to the point where buying an entirely new machine would make better sense.
A 16GB RunCore SSD costs $99 while a 32GB is $159. Would you upgrade your older laptop with one of these to give it new life, or would you prefer to put that money towards a new entry-level replacement?
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I'll wait until SSD provides a lot more capacity with much affordable price just like the regular hard drives.
They should of used a DMV center as the testing environment instead of CES. Maybe it could of sparked some much needed updating at most DMV's.
At $2 per GiB yes; but, at the current prices that is a definet no... laptop works just fine. Who would not like some extra speed, but not at 500 CAD for a 128 GiB SSD - don't consider 64 GiB SSD a practicle upgrade.
you mean my dell 2650 could come to life again? This would be the 4th time I believe, since I gave up after the 3rd rebuild.
I'd get a 7200 RPM hard drive with more space for the laptop. At least when it finally gets to the point that I can no longer stand how slow the basic experience is I can turn it into a storage server.
so, an SSD is going to compensate the lack of ram and cpu?
Well... for $130 I can get a sweet 40Gb Intel SSD. So if I were to invest in a longer lifespan on my old laptop that would be it. Otherwise, that money may be better spent on a new nettop or entry level laptop. Am not really concerned with storage on a laptop/nettop since my desktop is my main PC and all my stuff is stored there. My nettop is mainly just for doing presentations for my business and only has a few docs and whatnot on it.
Well my pentium M laptop is an IDE hard drive and not serial ata so i doubt I could find an ssd that would work with it.
I think most people would want more than a 32GB drive. When the 64's drop below $150 I think this would be a good upgrade.
I don't know about Winblows but I will put a SSD drive in my Linux laptop when the original drive dies, by then they may actually be big enough and cheap enough to be worth it.
It's a good thought. But if the laptop has an ancient hard drive, it's also likely got ancient RAM and CPU to go with it.
I would consider doing this, but it'd be on a case to case basis.
Ya, I need an IDE SSD...
The only ones that exist worry me that they might have the jmicon controller issue. I want a good one that I know will work. All of the good ones though are made for SATA.
I believe at laptop prices nowdays SSD still makes no sense unless economically you can justify the upgrade IE.Autocad,rendering work,Gaming if thats ur thing,or any other way in which the ssd will proove itself usefull as for everyday normal people use i think not. SSDs will become chepaer and thus i will upgrde then but as to upgrade older machines i believe not. Im pretty sure my wife was better off getting a 500 dollar vaio with a Dual core CPU bigger HD and windows 7 than putting a ssd on her aging compaq with a pentium m and windows xp. Just my 2 cents
All you need is a mini PCIe slot... which old laptops don't have...
Why spend $100-$200 to revive old slow laptop where you can get a decent BRAND NEW one for $400-500?
It's like buying a $20 ink for an old printer that only prints where new one is $60 comes with ink, that prints, scans, copies AND faxes WITH warranty.
Would you be hampered at all if your laptop only supports Sata 1.5GB/s?
Since about all I do is gaming, an SSD in my laptops is the least of my financial concern.
The SSD can be put into another piece of hardware once you're done with the laptop, so it's actually a pretty solid investment.
I'd consider upgrading to a new SSD over a new laptop.
For $100 I'd put a 30gb in my old Compaq laptop and run Windows XP on it. I wouldn't run Win7 so I'd also want drivers to support TRIM.
I wouldn't pay the prices listed here at $100 for 16gb. That's just too small.
Oh yeah it would also have to be IDE. Aren't most laptops with SATA already new enough to not require an SSD upgrade? I want my 1.6Ghz Athlon XP Compaq with 512mb RAM to be usable again...
that is why the initial eeepc's became so popular, and why the later releases with hdd got so criticized for being slow!
Windows XP + MS Office / OpenOffice = 5.5GB
Linux Mint + OpenOffice + GIMP + everything else that comes preinstalled = 4.5GB
So I can see using a 16GB SSD but my biggest problem with old laptops is the lack of RAM and poor battery life / battery life degradation. Add a new battery and a RAM upgrade and you might as well buy a new laptop with a faster processor, better screen, better power efficiency and a warranty.
why would you want to run new OS in an old laptops??? installing more RAM and bigger hard disk make more sense. that is if that laptop still alive...
64-128 is all I need in a laptop. I got my desktop for heavy needs.
I bought 9x160gb X-25m (Gen 2) for my developers. My system has no more of the operating system aging affects... best $500 per dev we've ever invested.
It actually saves us money putting them into the systems due to long compile times with a regular HD.
Well... for $130 I can get a sweet 40Gb Intel SSD. So if I were to invest in a longer lifespan on my old laptop that would be it. Otherwise, that money may be better spent on a new nettop or entry level laptop. Am not really concerned with storage on a laptop/nettop since my desktop is my main PC and all my stuff is stored there. My nettop is mainly just for doing presentations for my business and only has a few docs and whatnot on it.
for $200, you cna get a sweet Intel x18-m 80GB 1.8" SSD (less performance than 2.5" line though).
=D
XP still works fine on a machine with 256MB of RAM and a 1GHz CPU.
Some real bonehead comments on this thread. Any of you actually try this? We decided against replacing my wife's aging Sony Z1a - 1.3GHz Pentium mobile and instead put a 30GB SSD ($100 from Amazon). All I can say is the transformation was amazing. The laptop boots in under 10 seconds so we don't even hibernate anymore, it's faster to just shutdown/reboot. Apps fly open, it's been a better experience than I've had on any computer, never mind laptop. Now of course it's not a gaming laptop. This was an IDE drive, which kinds of sucks for future use, but in the end, it meant keeping the laptop and saving the $500-800 we probably would have spent on a new one.
Runs XP Home with 768MB RAM (mobo max). 30GB to be honest seems like tons of room, even after a bunch of music and photos were loaded. I did a bunch of tweaks recommended by various websites and run a caching program continuously that I think lumps writes together somehow (can't remember name). There are never any stutters or freezes. VM is off, although I've tried setting it to different amounts and didn't notice any difference. I still enjoy showing off to people how quickly the laptop responds and I wish I could afford to upgrade the rest of the computer in the house to SSD for boot drives.
Forgot to add - completely silent laptop now. We also bought new battery for $60 so total upgrade cost $160. Since the battery is new I can't comment on any extended run time due to the SSD. With the double capacity battery though we get easily 5-7 hours of use with reasonable settings. The old centrinos and the Sony Z1a in particular were frugal with the juice.
Nice add-on but that doesn't gonna compensate for the lack of CPU power and RAM.
My laptop runs on a celeron 2.6Ghz and aside from the battery (that died a long time ago) it worked well as a mobile workstation using 1,5 Gig's of ram.
It even ran windows 7 and WoW at speeds that wont make you want to kill yourself.
However the ram died and PC-133 SODIMM are about as expensive as a cheap SSD for this machine.
In conclusion i would have loved to extend this laptops live with an SSD however getting new RAM at 60 euro and a SSD at 119 euro totals a whooping 179 euro ... a nice acer extensa 5230 (essentially 16x faster then my current machine to start with) costs only 275 euro.