You CAN speed up your old laptop, expand its liefspan and get an extrernal hard drive for “free” during the process.
Chances are, if you have a laptop that is over 3 years old, the hard drive in your laptop is a HDD and is dying. HDDs or Hard Disk Drives are storage drives where your computer’s data is store. The average life span of a HDD is about 3 to 5 years. However, it’s possible for a HDD to start deteriorating sooner depending on how much its been used. A HDD is like a car engine in that a car egine has multiple moving parts that help it run. The more you drive your car, the more wear-and-tear you put on your engine, and evetually the engine and it’s part will start to break down. You can reaplce engine parts but that gets expensive over time. HDDs breakdown in a similar fashion to a car engine. Replacing parts in an HDD will never be cost effective and the best thing to do is move your data to another drive before your HDD crashes and your date becomes unrecoverable.
When your laptops HDD starts to die, you WILL notice it. Simple tasks like opening documents and starting programs take a very long time to load. Windows itself may take several minutes to load.
By upgrading to an SDD or Solid State Drive you can give your laptop new life. SSDs, unlike HDDs, have no moving parts thus do not deteriorate over time which gives them a lifespan of decades before they being to breakdown.
The Reason Why You’re Here
So how are you going to speed up your computer for $120? The first part is the SDD. You can find a 500GB SSD for $70 or under. Next thing you’ll need to consider is transferring your data from your old HDD to the new SSD. There is software you can purchase to handle the data transfer or you can do it manually (NOT RECOMMENDED). You’ll also have to consider that you’ll have to reinstall your opertaing system.
Once you’ve installed your SSD, installed your operating system, and transferred your data to the new SSD, you’ll be stuck with your old HDD. There are two things you can do with your old HDD. You can either keep it as is and store it somewhere as a backup in case you mistakenly delete a file or need to transfer the data to another computer. Another thing you can do is turn that old HDD into an external HDD by putting it into a hard drive enclosure.
When it’s all said and done. You’ll have a laptop that runs faster than it did when you first bought and have a laptop that could possbily give you another few years until you are ready to spend some money and buy a more modern laptop.
If you want more detailed info on the differences between a HDD and SSD check out the video below: