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I bought myself an early birthday present: an SSD to replace the hard drive in my netbook.
My netbook itself is nothing impressive: it was commodity hardware three years ago when I bought it for $300 or so. Even then it wasn't the fastest machine by any stretch. Still, it is small, lightweight and does what I need it to very reliably. My needs are simple at the machine fits my needs.
A few months ago, I replaced the battery as the old one was reaching the end of its useful lifespan. The improvement was so great I kicked myself for weeks that I hadn't done it sooner. A couple of months ago, I doubled the RAM installed; it was a nice improvement in performance although not earth-shattering. The cost of the RAM replacement was so insignificant (about $30) that again I kicked myself for not having done it sooner.
The old 120GB hard drive is adequate for my purposes, especially since I archive large media files to an external disk, so I hadn't given it a great deal of thought. Still, I've read a number of articles extorting the masses to make the transition to an SSD for a typical three-fold speed increase and an enormous improvement in battery life. The costs were a little daunting but I received a coupon for a modest price break on a SATA drive nearly the same size as the disk in my netbook, so I indulged myself.
I'm kicking myself I didn't do this sooner.
OK, my netbook is only the older SATA interface instead of SATA III so I'm not seeing the full gain, but it has cut the boot time in half. Apps jump onto the screen when executed instead of grudgingly appearing. At this point, I have only just started playing with it so I can't say what different it has on the overall battery life, but I'm hoping for good things.
In all, I thought my tried & true netbook just gained another year or two of useful life.
My netbook itself is nothing impressive: it was commodity hardware three years ago when I bought it for $300 or so. Even then it wasn't the fastest machine by any stretch. Still, it is small, lightweight and does what I need it to very reliably. My needs are simple at the machine fits my needs.
A few months ago, I replaced the battery as the old one was reaching the end of its useful lifespan. The improvement was so great I kicked myself for weeks that I hadn't done it sooner. A couple of months ago, I doubled the RAM installed; it was a nice improvement in performance although not earth-shattering. The cost of the RAM replacement was so insignificant (about $30) that again I kicked myself for not having done it sooner.
The old 120GB hard drive is adequate for my purposes, especially since I archive large media files to an external disk, so I hadn't given it a great deal of thought. Still, I've read a number of articles extorting the masses to make the transition to an SSD for a typical three-fold speed increase and an enormous improvement in battery life. The costs were a little daunting but I received a coupon for a modest price break on a SATA drive nearly the same size as the disk in my netbook, so I indulged myself.
I'm kicking myself I didn't do this sooner.
OK, my netbook is only the older SATA interface instead of SATA III so I'm not seeing the full gain, but it has cut the boot time in half. Apps jump onto the screen when executed instead of grudgingly appearing. At this point, I have only just started playing with it so I can't say what different it has on the overall battery life, but I'm hoping for good things.
In all, I thought my tried & true netbook just gained another year or two of useful life.
