Will a Solid State Hard Drive Change My Life?

SSD in my case - huge difference, boot time faster, G1000 loads a lot faster, plus I don't have to hear silly HD noise, etc.
On the other hand if you are like me (do one thing at a time on a PC and play no fancy 'games' nor edit video, etc) increasing your RAM from 4 GB to more won't do you much. I rarely hit 3+ GB RAM usage, G1000 trainer is the most intensive program I ever launch.
 
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SixPapaCharlie said:
Just looked up the specs on this machine, 4GB max.
I know my chips are below 800mHz though (maybe 300 or 500 I have to look)

Wondering if I should just get the fastest PC2 6400 DDr2

Good news is it looks like RAM upgrade is going to be cheap.
Click to expand...

Replace the machine. Seriously.

Rich
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Just looked up the specs on this machine, 4GB max.
I know my chips are below 800mHz though (maybe 300 or 500 I have to look)

Wondering if I should just get the fastest PC2 6400 DDr2

Good news is it looks like RAM upgrade is going to be cheap.
Click to expand...




Yikes! Get a new machine like Hillbilly said.

Give it to the kids or take it out in a field with a baseball bat and put it out of your misery. :lol:


office-space-printer-smash-xAXO.jpg
 
I'm going with "replace the machine".

That processor is just one generation prior to some pretty decent if dated ones, but it's just a tad too long in the tooth now.

Future proof the new machine a bit and get at least an i7 and 16 GB of RAM and an SSD and you probably won't be buying a computer again for a long time.

Bloatware has slowed a bit and processors aren't getting faster by leaps and bounds like they used to. Even Adobe announced a crappy quarter this quarter.

I once thought AMD was going to give Intel a run for their money, but that fizzled and I wouldn't bother with them anymore.

Also if you go laptop vs desktop keep in mind that the mobile i7 is a trade off processor. It's typically sold as a two core, two thread per core, and way cheaper Intel processors with eight cores are cheap as hell lately.

We can build monster machines that whallop our old servers as desktop machines for about $1500 for developers these days.

You can get laptops with the monster processors but they're labeled "mobile workstation" and run well over $3K.
 
Get a MacBook Air. Run windows in a VM if you need it.

I do windows database development on this platform. Have a win7 and win10 VM open at the same time, Visual Studio and MS-SQL running in both VM's.

RAM and a good SSD are your friend. (Processors have leveled off in the last few years)
 
Wipe the drive and put Xubuntu or Linux Mint on it and let the kids run it into the ground. You can get 2-3 more years use out if it.
 
Nah, I have 20 years of MS intuition built into my brain.
I'm not switching. Better or worse, my habits are ingrained.
 
I just did this, do it... And reinstall the OS and make some adjustments after install...m
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Nah, I have 20 years of MS intuition built into my brain.
I'm not switching. Better or worse, my habits are ingrained.
Click to expand...


Is that like Deja Fu?

Somewhere, somehow, I know I've been kicked in the head by Microsoft, like this, before?
 
Vinny said:
Wipe the drive and put Xubuntu or Linux Mint on it and let the kids run it into the ground. You can get 2-3 more years use out if it.
Click to expand...

Kids, heck. Two or three years ago I was ready to toss my windows machine out the window, until out of frustration I loaded Unbuntu 12.04. Cost me all of $4 for the disk. Speed increased exponentially, and haven't found a problem yet that can't be solved either with linux distro's, or running xp under a vm. Well, except for getting rid of Apple altogether. No a good solution for adding music to any iPod touch that uses a hash file.

But swapping files with Android is easy.
 
asechrest said:
Bryan: I suggest building your own new comp. It's a lot of fun. I have built my own for the last 15+ years and while the cost savings isn't what it once was, it's still enjoyable and you get exactly what you want without bloatware. Just don't bend the CPU pins. :yikes:
Click to expand...

+1 building your own. Built my first computer about a year ago. Gigabyte board/GTX970/i5 4440K/16gb corsair ddr3 ram. Turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. Performance is awesome and it's built to my purpose (gaming). Adding an SSD made booting/game load times quicker but you have to pick and choose what goes on the SSD since they don't hold nearly as much as HDDs (unless you want to get really spendy).

https://pcpartpicker.com/

:D
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I have our 2 primary computers at the house that are ~3-4 years old.
Acer Aspire which I have added more memory and upgraded to Windows 7

Deets:
attachment.php


They seem slower these days and I am wondering if I just swap out the current C drive with a solid state drive, will I notice a significant improvement in performance?
Click to expand...

I have a very similar computer, and did add a solid state drive. It made the boot time much quicker, but demanding graphic programs, XPlane, and compilers still struggled.

I wound up spending about $600 on a new box with an Intel i5, ssd, and Windows 10. This new box blows the doors off my old one.
 
JimNtexas said:
I have a very similar computer, and did add a solid state drive. It made the boot time much quicker, but demanding graphic programs, XPlane, and compilers still struggled.

I wound up spending about $600 on a new box with an Intel i5, ssd, and Windows 10. This new box blows the doors off my old one.
Click to expand...

The only taxing thing I use my machine for is recording music and it actually works fine for that.

What I am getting annoyed about is I pull up CNN or youtube and any streaming video, just brings the computer to its knees. It used to not do that.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
or youtube and any streaming video, just brings the computer to its knees. It used to not do that.
Click to expand...
That's bad. It should not happen, you may want to take your PC to folks in your area who would 'detox' your PC (some do phenomenal work) or simply like other suggested - replace it, it is already a dated machine and at some point makes no sense to pour more $$ into it.
 
RJM62 said:
The first PC I built had 256 kB of RAM. That maxed out the motherboard. My geek friends considered me a stud.

Rich
Click to expand...

I bought a brand-name IBM PC in late 1983. It came fully populated at 256k RAM. Within 6 months I installed an AST Six Pack which boosted the RAM up to 640k total. It was still very limited though, with dual floppies. In a few years I bought a used 5 meg HD. Man how times have changed!

-Skip
 
brian];1916216 said:
My $0.02... Give this one to the kids and get something new. Don't get crazy, but it's time to spend some money.
Click to expand...

I would agree.
 
Any thoughts on Apple's "Fusion Drive"?

I'm about to pull the trigger on a new Mac Mini to replace an aging 2008 MacBook Pro. The one I'm considering comes with a 1TB Fusion Drive standard, and 2TB Fusion Drive for just $100 more.

Getting pure SSD is a whole lot more - $800 for a 1TB SSD drive, for instance.
 
JeffDG said:
I once put a meg of RAM into an Apple ][e
Click to expand...

I'm impressed. The 6502 processor only addressed 64k. But I think I know the card you are talking about. I remember a word processing board you could put into an apple 2. Add in an amber monitor and you were night tech for the mid 80s....
 
OK, more stroll down memory lane(see what I did there?) In a galaxy far, far away I worked at Burroughs in the wafer fab. Our newest chip was a 16 KILObyte RAM and we had a 1KB scratch area. Wooohooooo. Our line worked a 3 inch wafer and our yield target was 35% at die cut, and 22% after mount and burn-in. We - were - hot - spit(or so it seemed). Then, a few weeks later IBM announced delivery of their 64KB RAM. groan...
 
I remember putting a tracing on a Zenith Z-100 that allowed it to access 768Kb when in DOS mode, up from the normal 640Kb limit.

I also remember running out of available RAM on a 4Kb Tandy TRS-80 in one of my first programs where I used PEEK and POKE to input assembly code.
 
FastEddieB said:
Any thoughts on Apple's "Fusion Drive"?

I'm about to pull the trigger on a new Mac Mini to replace an aging 2008 MacBook Pro. The one I'm considering comes with a 1TB Fusion Drive standard, and 2TB Fusion Drive for just $100 more.

Getting pure SSD is a whole lot more - $800 for a 1TB SSD drive, for instance.
Click to expand...

Price had dropped alot in the last few months, only $400 is with shipping.
 
brian];1917064 said:
I'm impressed. The 6502 processor only addressed 64k. But I think I know the card you are talking about. I remember a word processing board you could put into an apple 2. Add in an amber monitor and you were night tech for the mid 80s....
Click to expand...


Yep...lots of fun making it work, but had a RAMdisk running with ProDOS that had every app I owned loaded on it...so, in reality my Apple ][e had a SSD.
 
Brian with a Y....

My HP is over three years old, I put a SSD in. 4G Ram, windows 7 Home Premium, i7 chip.

My computer is better than new, local information opens faster than I can react. Hosted is still slow due to remote retrieval. That is true about pulling any information. Smallest pipe determines speed.

If you have a second bay on your laptop, put in a small SSD (240G) and put your OS on it and your computer will go faster. Less than 100 bucks and 3-4 hours for a clean installation.

I am migrating the office to them. My estimation is that I will spend $800 and increase our productivity by 5-8%.

It is like going from a C152 to a BE35.
 
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Dang....

Never realized POA was a bunch of computer geeks....

Since we are no longer talking about who's airplane is faster, then let's compare geek skills...

Anyone run a computer with a z80 and a 6502? The cool part was allocating your file manually. You added an entry to the catalog with a starting and ending points. Then the 8inch floppy did its thing for a minute or so and you hope the file was not bigger. Oh, don't forget to write the eof marker.

In redneck format, you ain't an old computer geek if you have not:
- written a file to cassette tape. (or remember cassette tape.)
- remember 3.5inch, 5 inch, 8inch, oh xxxx if you remember floppies.
- oh this Sucks.... Anyone remember CD. NO! NOT DVD! CD.??
- remember when you could read and understand the chip designations. 7400,74ls00....
- remember 24 bit computers? Ugh. That 16 bit conversion was a pain...
- remember when you could poke and peek into system memory? GPF? What's that?
- 4k BLL???
- TSR?

Ugh.. Time for some whiskey.... Have to figure out an html 5 script that will blow up Bryans little 4gb pc...
 
brian];1917179 said:
Dang....

Never realized POA was a bunch of computer geeks....

Since we are no longer talking about who's airplane is faster, then let's compare geek skills...

Anyone run a computer with a z80 and a 6502? The cool part was allocating your file manually. You added an entry to the catalog with a starting and ending points. Then the 8inch floppy did its thing for a minute or so and you hope the file was not bigger. Oh, don't forget to write the eof marker.

In redneck format, you ain't an old computer geek if you have not:
- written a file to cassette tape. (or remember cassette tape.)
- remember 3.5inch, 5 inch, 8inch, oh xxxx if you remember floppies.
- oh this Sucks.... Anyone remember CD. NO! NOT DVD! CD.??
- remember when you could read and understand the chip designations. 7400,74ls00....
- remember 24 bit computers? Ugh. That 16 bit conversion was a pain...
- remember when you could poke and peek into system memory? GPF? What's that?
- 4k BLL???
- TSR?

Ugh.. Time for some whiskey.... Have to figure out an html 5 script that will blow up Bryans little 4gb pc...
Click to expand...
Holy jeez, I'm old... I not only ran a Z80, I designed and built a uC using a Z80.


Sad thing is 30 years from now I don't think "millennials" will be having a similar conversation. They never built anything from scratch. They're just "users."
 
texasag93 said:
Price had dropped alot in the last few months, only $400 is with shipping.
Click to expand...


Samsung's V-NAND plant coming up to speed was a game changer in the SSD affordability market. Even their consumer versions carry five year warranties now and 10 on the Pro models. And they're all screaming fast.
 
Just rebuilt a 2009 PC (Intel i7-920 with 12GB RAM), sticking with Win7, and reusing everything from before except the OS disk is now a 1 TB Samsung SSD "850 Pro". It seems screaming fast again.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
The only taxing thing I use my machine for is recording music and it actually works fine for that.

What I am getting annoyed about is I pull up CNN or youtube and any streaming video, just brings the computer to its knees. It used to not do that.
Click to expand...

Well... Another cheap option to try might be an add-on video card with a gig or two of onboard RAM. You may be able to find one on the cheap in the clearance bins at Micro Center or Fry's, if there's one by you. I wouldn't be surprised if you found one for $20.00 or so.

Check for compatibility with both the mobo and the OS, of course, if you want to try that.

Rich
 
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A few years ago my work laptop died. Really interesting failure, the lights on the keyboard would flash when the thing was turned OFF. I took it to our PC service people at work and they were going to simply pull the hard drive out and put it in another laptop of the same model. Well, the screw that held the hard drive in was cross threaded and the tech couldn't get it out, so they built me a new machine. The only differences were the new one had Windows 7 (instead of XP) and it had an SSD. Once I got it back with my files moved I found the following key difference. The old laptop took 5 minutes from the time I hit the power button until Outlook was up. The new laptop took 1 minute. Same model laptop, same amount of RAM. I don't know how much of the speed up came from the OS upgrade and how much came from moving to the SSD, but the impact was dramatic.

In other words, moving to an SSD has a good potential of giving you a significant benefit.
 
Ghery said:
Well, the screw that held the hard drive in was cross threaded and the tech couldn't get it out,
Click to expand...

Noob. He didn't try hard enough.



Ghery said:
In other words, moving to an SSD has a good potential of giving you a significant benefit.
Click to expand...


The key piece of information was when someone found the motherboard he's working with won't do 6GB/s only 3.

The SSD will help but not nearly as much as it could on a modern motherboard.
 
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