The Wifes laptop was giving warnings about impending hard drive failiure so decided it was time to get a new drive As its only really used for interweb and a few games (nothing 3d intensive) I thought I'd give one of these new fangled Solid state drives a try.
Picked up a 64Gb 2.5" Sata drive from Ebay for about 50 quid delivered and set about the fitting.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/KingSpec-64GB-2-5-SATA-II-4CH-SSD-Solid-State-Disk-Drive-MLC-Flash-159-103MB-S-/330735447538?pt=US_Internal_Hard_Disk_Drives&hash=item4d015e6df2First thing I did was to time the boot up with the old hard drive... Time to windows login screen (Windows 7 32bit) 52 seconds
Quick clean up (CCCleaner) and full defrag (diskkeeper)
Installed Paragon Migrate OS to SSD software.
Rebooted and did another boot timing.... Time to boot now 44 seconds
http://www.paragon-software.com/technologies/components/migrate-OS-to-SSD/Fitted the SSD into a USB hard drive enclosure and connected to the laptop (If I was using a desktop PC this wouldn't be needed)
Next I ran the Migrate software. This was a simple job of telling it what drive to copy the OS to. The software does a few other things to the SSD in the back ground (for example setting the correct offset)
Copying took about 20 mins
Shut down the laptop and swapped out the drive for the new one.
Rebooted laptop and timed the boot sequence... Time to boot to login screen is now 19 seconds
The wife has been using the laptop over the weekend and is very happy, says it is hell of a lot faster to open programs and gennerally quicker all round.
Bonus points for me! and no need to buy a new laptop for another 6 months or so. This means the toys fund gains the cost of a new laptop!
A couple of points to note:-
Solid state drives are expensive compared to regular Hard drives especially when moving into bigger capacity drives so may not be suitable for all but for laptop users its a surefire way to gain a bit of extra performance and give maybe a year of extra usablity