Press the "Go Faster" Button

I’ve had to change the disk on our laptop this week. I’d actually been planning on doing this prior to the Windows 10 upgrade but the disk started to make odd “servo about to go kaput” noises and throwing up strange errors which rather indicated that it was about to go “phut” in a losing-a-weekend-putting-it-right kind of way.

It was quite fortunate that I had the disk to hand. My intention was to replace the existing disk with a solid state drive so that if the Windows 10 upgrade did something untoward I would have an easy fail back point: just stick the old disk back in. I ended up going for a solid state drive (SSD), a Samsung 850 Evo disc, which is now quite reasonably priced (it was only around £40 more than a traditional hard disk drive) and meant that I had the advantage of a nice quick boot up.

In fact I’ve done a few things to speed up that laptop. It was a cheap Medion branded one which I bought from Asda around 4 years ago for the kids to do their homework. These are often sold by Aldi as “special buys” but you actually get quite a lot of laptop for the money – not least of which was a nice big screen which meant we could use it as a portable DVD player when on holiday. The limitations with it were more down to the chip (a rather creaky Intel Celeron) and limited memory: 2GB.

I had considered buying a SSD a few months back as the laptop was constantly grinding to a halt and I could hear the disk buzzing away like a demented fly. However, I checked the memory consumption and found it really struggling to cope with the 2GB supplied with it. Having checked for spare memory slots I ended up buying an additional 4GB for it (this was only £20) and it cured the slowdowns immediately. It just goes to show what a memory hog Windows 7 can be. Now with the additional solid state disk it feels positively snappy.

Of course the biggest performance improvement we had was shortly after I bought the thing. I spent an afternoon uninstalling all the extra software that the manufacturer insisted on installing that provided no useful functionality whatsoever but succeeded in making it clank along like a crippled difference engine. In fact I’m sure that must be one of the big advantages with Apple computers in that they don’t pre-install that kind of rubbish. It’s just that they charge four times as much for the privilege of not inflicting it on the unwary punter. I’m sure there is a business model in there somewhere.