SSD is definitely the way to go to breathe new life in to an old laptop
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About 10 days ago, I posted a thread; The Lounge[^] discussing how to decide when it is time to upgrade your machine. In among the sarcasm, humor and anecdotes was actually a couple of good suggestions, with the key one being upgrade to SSD. :thumbsup: Thank you to those who suggested this. What impresses me most is how much faster web browsing is, I guess caching all those images to the HDD really slowed things down. With that said, I have managed to stumble on to an issue When the drive arrived, I jumped on CNET read a step by step article on upgrading your HDD to SSD, downloaded the recommended tool, plugged in the SSD to the USB and cloned the HDD to the SSD. Removed the HDD and installed the SSD. Crossed my fingers and restarted the machine. Much to my elation, it booted quickly, windows started faster and life was good. :) Hey wait a minute. Not so fast. What's this? I bought a 1TB SSD and when I look at the drive properties it says 500GB. It shows the other 500GB as un-partitioned space, which makes no sense for an SSD. 500GB was the size of my HDD. Apparently the shareware tool caused this during the clone process. Moral of the story - "you get what you pay for", or "if it is free it is for me, except when it comes to shareware" Has anybody else run on to this? Am I hosed at this point and have to go back to ground zero and start the process all over again? Or is there some way to claim the un-partitioned space?
I just recently updated my laptop from a 28 gb ssd to a 256 gb ssd. Not much choice if I wanted to get a recent Windows Update to work since most of the space was used for the OS, with only the smaller applications installed on the SSD, the big ones like Office on the hard drive. What really drove me was that I had a version of Visual Studio that expired, and could not install the free version on the secondary drive. Had to rebuild the machine. Anyway, if I was going to rebuild the machine, I figured I should just put in a new SSD since 28 GB was not going to hack it. If this had happened to me it would have been pointless since I needed a bigger hard drive just to install the OS with its newest update. On the software I used it was obvious how to increase the space to use the whole drive.
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I went with 1TB Crucial
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About 10 days ago, I posted a thread; The Lounge[^] discussing how to decide when it is time to upgrade your machine. In among the sarcasm, humor and anecdotes was actually a couple of good suggestions, with the key one being upgrade to SSD. :thumbsup: Thank you to those who suggested this. What impresses me most is how much faster web browsing is, I guess caching all those images to the HDD really slowed things down. With that said, I have managed to stumble on to an issue When the drive arrived, I jumped on CNET read a step by step article on upgrading your HDD to SSD, downloaded the recommended tool, plugged in the SSD to the USB and cloned the HDD to the SSD. Removed the HDD and installed the SSD. Crossed my fingers and restarted the machine. Much to my elation, it booted quickly, windows started faster and life was good. :) Hey wait a minute. Not so fast. What's this? I bought a 1TB SSD and when I look at the drive properties it says 500GB. It shows the other 500GB as un-partitioned space, which makes no sense for an SSD. 500GB was the size of my HDD. Apparently the shareware tool caused this during the clone process. Moral of the story - "you get what you pay for", or "if it is free it is for me, except when it comes to shareware" Has anybody else run on to this? Am I hosed at this point and have to go back to ground zero and start the process all over again? Or is there some way to claim the un-partitioned space?
And breathes new life into my productivity. Why they don't use SSD's where I work is beyond comprehension.
Latest Article - A Concise Overview of Threads Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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Personally, I'd create another partition or two out of that unallocated space...just something I've always done.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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That will certainly speed your Acer up but I don't think that you will get anything near the advertised speed unless your SATA bus is version 3.0 or higher. SATA 2.0 is capped at 300 MBs.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
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And breathes new life into my productivity. Why they don't use SSD's where I work is beyond comprehension.
Latest Article - A Concise Overview of Threads Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
one company I visited "upgraded" most of their desktops, of course the cheap idiots bought machines (dells "clearance stock") "2015 models" with HDD's of course. Complaint: "these new machines aren't any faster." Anyway a couple of the machines had the HDD's fail - just over a year so no warranty. Was a bit quiet for me so I offered to help fix them up. Quoted them SSD's, of course "why so expensive? (500GB Samsung, cheap, of course more then HDD). Anyway did convince them to go my way... and they loved it. (nice little couple days earner for a couple hours of actual simple work.) Only remaining complaint [which strangely ONLY comes from those still on HDD]: "when is my machine going to break down?" (I've suggested 'accidentally spilling coffee into the box' - no one has had the guts to do it).
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About 10 days ago, I posted a thread; The Lounge[^] discussing how to decide when it is time to upgrade your machine. In among the sarcasm, humor and anecdotes was actually a couple of good suggestions, with the key one being upgrade to SSD. :thumbsup: Thank you to those who suggested this. What impresses me most is how much faster web browsing is, I guess caching all those images to the HDD really slowed things down. With that said, I have managed to stumble on to an issue When the drive arrived, I jumped on CNET read a step by step article on upgrading your HDD to SSD, downloaded the recommended tool, plugged in the SSD to the USB and cloned the HDD to the SSD. Removed the HDD and installed the SSD. Crossed my fingers and restarted the machine. Much to my elation, it booted quickly, windows started faster and life was good. :) Hey wait a minute. Not so fast. What's this? I bought a 1TB SSD and when I look at the drive properties it says 500GB. It shows the other 500GB as un-partitioned space, which makes no sense for an SSD. 500GB was the size of my HDD. Apparently the shareware tool caused this during the clone process. Moral of the story - "you get what you pay for", or "if it is free it is for me, except when it comes to shareware" Has anybody else run on to this? Am I hosed at this point and have to go back to ground zero and start the process all over again? Or is there some way to claim the un-partitioned space?
littleGreenDude wrote:
SSD is definitely the way to go to breathe new life in to an old laptop
:thumbsup: That, and more RAM if your machine accepts it. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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I'm looking at this one for my 7-year-old Acer laptop: Amaon: Crucial 500gb[^] I'm seriously considering installing Linux on it and converting the current win7 install to a virtual machine.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013That's a really good price...almost a no-brainer! I've got an 8 yo laptop that received a SSD transplant about 2 years ago. Huge improvement! Well worth the money even then. At times I prefer it to a much newer hp laptop which seems to be haunted. :suss:
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I'm looking at this one for my 7-year-old Acer laptop: Amaon: Crucial 500gb[^] I'm seriously considering installing Linux on it and converting the current win7 install to a virtual machine.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013Crucial doesn't have the reputation Intel or Samsung have for their SSDs, but I have no idea what they're talking about. I have 4 or 5 Crucial drives, and I'm very happy with them. The price you're looking at makes it a no-brainer, even if your laptop's bus might not allow it to run at the full speed the drive is capable of. As a bonus, being a bog-standard SATA drive, you know you can physical migrate it to another system down the road.
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Crucial doesn't have the reputation Intel or Samsung have for their SSDs, but I have no idea what they're talking about. I have 4 or 5 Crucial drives, and I'm very happy with them. The price you're looking at makes it a no-brainer, even if your laptop's bus might not allow it to run at the full speed the drive is capable of. As a bonus, being a bog-standard SATA drive, you know you can physical migrate it to another system down the road.
All SSD is, is a different kind of memory than RAM. Crucial has an outstanding reputation for their RAM modules.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013 -
About 10 days ago, I posted a thread; The Lounge[^] discussing how to decide when it is time to upgrade your machine. In among the sarcasm, humor and anecdotes was actually a couple of good suggestions, with the key one being upgrade to SSD. :thumbsup: Thank you to those who suggested this. What impresses me most is how much faster web browsing is, I guess caching all those images to the HDD really slowed things down. With that said, I have managed to stumble on to an issue When the drive arrived, I jumped on CNET read a step by step article on upgrading your HDD to SSD, downloaded the recommended tool, plugged in the SSD to the USB and cloned the HDD to the SSD. Removed the HDD and installed the SSD. Crossed my fingers and restarted the machine. Much to my elation, it booted quickly, windows started faster and life was good. :) Hey wait a minute. Not so fast. What's this? I bought a 1TB SSD and when I look at the drive properties it says 500GB. It shows the other 500GB as un-partitioned space, which makes no sense for an SSD. 500GB was the size of my HDD. Apparently the shareware tool caused this during the clone process. Moral of the story - "you get what you pay for", or "if it is free it is for me, except when it comes to shareware" Has anybody else run on to this? Am I hosed at this point and have to go back to ground zero and start the process all over again? Or is there some way to claim the un-partitioned space?
I once had the litereally same and I brought this upon myself. When doing something similar as you did, I used dd to copy the whole disk block-wise. With the same result, the one partition was as large as it was before. The solution is incredibly simple: Resize the partition. Windows' own diskmgmt.msc is perfectly able to do so.
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Just curious here but what SSD did you go with. When I had to rebuild my home rig I went with one of these: Intel 600p[^]. I tell you what, those M.2 SSDs running on the PCIe bus are stupid fast and quite reasonably priced.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
I hope you did NOT by a CRUCIAL SSD. we will no longer install them. We have had 3 SSD Failures. ALL OF THEM CRUCIALS. Oh, they replaced 1 or 2 of them under warranty. Useless because by then, they were too small anyways, but we did it to extract our pound of flesh. 2 of them were FIRMWARE Problems THEY CREATED by having some leftover testing code in. We used them for too many hours, and triggered the code. We use ABC: Anything But Crucial. LOL We like the SanDisk ones, and have no problems. We replace every 3 years. Our machines are usually on 24x7.
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About 10 days ago, I posted a thread; The Lounge[^] discussing how to decide when it is time to upgrade your machine. In among the sarcasm, humor and anecdotes was actually a couple of good suggestions, with the key one being upgrade to SSD. :thumbsup: Thank you to those who suggested this. What impresses me most is how much faster web browsing is, I guess caching all those images to the HDD really slowed things down. With that said, I have managed to stumble on to an issue When the drive arrived, I jumped on CNET read a step by step article on upgrading your HDD to SSD, downloaded the recommended tool, plugged in the SSD to the USB and cloned the HDD to the SSD. Removed the HDD and installed the SSD. Crossed my fingers and restarted the machine. Much to my elation, it booted quickly, windows started faster and life was good. :) Hey wait a minute. Not so fast. What's this? I bought a 1TB SSD and when I look at the drive properties it says 500GB. It shows the other 500GB as un-partitioned space, which makes no sense for an SSD. 500GB was the size of my HDD. Apparently the shareware tool caused this during the clone process. Moral of the story - "you get what you pay for", or "if it is free it is for me, except when it comes to shareware" Has anybody else run on to this? Am I hosed at this point and have to go back to ground zero and start the process all over again? Or is there some way to claim the un-partitioned space?
Totally agree with the subject of the original post. A few months ago, I used the free version of Macrium Reflect to upgrade my HP ENVY DV7 from a 700GB HDD to a Samsung 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III SSD. The power on process is so fast that I no longer use Windows Hibernate when I power down at night. Furthermore, I have the free version of Macrium Reflect making daily incremental image backups and a once per month total backup image to my NAS device. Very pleased with the result.
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I hope you did NOT by a CRUCIAL SSD. we will no longer install them. We have had 3 SSD Failures. ALL OF THEM CRUCIALS. Oh, they replaced 1 or 2 of them under warranty. Useless because by then, they were too small anyways, but we did it to extract our pound of flesh. 2 of them were FIRMWARE Problems THEY CREATED by having some leftover testing code in. We used them for too many hours, and triggered the code. We use ABC: Anything But Crucial. LOL We like the SanDisk ones, and have no problems. We replace every 3 years. Our machines are usually on 24x7.
Nope. I pretty much stick to Intel SSDs. I have yet to have one die on their own without some external cause. I lost one when a cheap-a$$ SATA cable shorted out; sparks, fire, and smoke included. Lost most of the PC on that one :sigh:
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
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Just curious here but what SSD did you go with. When I had to rebuild my home rig I went with one of these: Intel 600p[^]. I tell you what, those M.2 SSDs running on the PCIe bus are stupid fast and quite reasonably priced.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
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I hope you did NOT by a CRUCIAL SSD. we will no longer install them. We have had 3 SSD Failures. ALL OF THEM CRUCIALS. Oh, they replaced 1 or 2 of them under warranty. Useless because by then, they were too small anyways, but we did it to extract our pound of flesh. 2 of them were FIRMWARE Problems THEY CREATED by having some leftover testing code in. We used them for too many hours, and triggered the code. We use ABC: Anything But Crucial. LOL We like the SanDisk ones, and have no problems. We replace every 3 years. Our machines are usually on 24x7.
Well, all of the SSDs have 5-ratings amounting to between 84 and 87%, so in all truth, it's a crap-shoot anyway. There's also this one in the same general price range: Amazon.com: Samsung 860 Evo 500GB 2.5 inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E500B/AM): Computers & Accessories[^]
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013 -
All SSD is, is a different kind of memory than RAM. Crucial has an outstanding reputation for their RAM modules.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013 -
I'm looking at this one for my 7-year-old Acer laptop: Amaon: Crucial 500gb[^] I'm seriously considering installing Linux on it and converting the current win7 install to a virtual machine.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013Regarding "seriously considering installing Linux on it and converting the current win7 install to a virtual machine", I am thinking along the same lines. If you do this, please let us know how that works out.
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About 10 days ago, I posted a thread; The Lounge[^] discussing how to decide when it is time to upgrade your machine. In among the sarcasm, humor and anecdotes was actually a couple of good suggestions, with the key one being upgrade to SSD. :thumbsup: Thank you to those who suggested this. What impresses me most is how much faster web browsing is, I guess caching all those images to the HDD really slowed things down. With that said, I have managed to stumble on to an issue When the drive arrived, I jumped on CNET read a step by step article on upgrading your HDD to SSD, downloaded the recommended tool, plugged in the SSD to the USB and cloned the HDD to the SSD. Removed the HDD and installed the SSD. Crossed my fingers and restarted the machine. Much to my elation, it booted quickly, windows started faster and life was good. :) Hey wait a minute. Not so fast. What's this? I bought a 1TB SSD and when I look at the drive properties it says 500GB. It shows the other 500GB as un-partitioned space, which makes no sense for an SSD. 500GB was the size of my HDD. Apparently the shareware tool caused this during the clone process. Moral of the story - "you get what you pay for", or "if it is free it is for me, except when it comes to shareware" Has anybody else run on to this? Am I hosed at this point and have to go back to ground zero and start the process all over again? Or is there some way to claim the un-partitioned space?
Glad it worked. There are lots of partition managers out there. You can use the diskpart command line tool (not very user friendly) or the Windows disk management tool (right click “This PC” then select Manage). Make sure you have a complete backup before messing with the partition. I’ve never had a problem with it but you never know.
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I hope you did NOT by a CRUCIAL SSD. we will no longer install them. We have had 3 SSD Failures. ALL OF THEM CRUCIALS. Oh, they replaced 1 or 2 of them under warranty. Useless because by then, they were too small anyways, but we did it to extract our pound of flesh. 2 of them were FIRMWARE Problems THEY CREATED by having some leftover testing code in. We used them for too many hours, and triggered the code. We use ABC: Anything But Crucial. LOL We like the SanDisk ones, and have no problems. We replace every 3 years. Our machines are usually on 24x7.