A worthwhile upgrade!!

[Dave_S]

My main PC, a Dell XPS-8300, is now a approaching four years old, and although good spec, and not cheap at the time, it had been slowing down.

Slowing down, not by virtue of age, but the number of large of applications installed.

It has an i7 processor, so not lacking in that department, and running Win7 Home Premium 64bit, but with only 6Gb of DDR3 RAM.

So, I decided to give it some 'more wind in its sails'.

Stage 1: was to double the amount of RAM from 6Gb to 12Gb (it can take up to 16Gb, the max for Win7 Home Premium).

This sped up working with large applications and large files nicely.

Tonight, I completed Stage 2, which was to replace the existing 7400 rpm SATA Hard Drive, with a SATA Solid State Drive (SSD).

Now it really 'sings', especially in the 'boot-up' department, and the accessing of files.

The process of copying the existing C drive onto the SSD, was made slick and easy, using the 'Clone' facility in Acronis True Image 2015, which is my back-up creation software.

It was simply a matter of connecting the SSD to a spare SATA port on the Motherboard, and letting the Acronis software get on with it.

So, I have now 'breathed some new life into the old dog".

Dave

[paul linton]

Re: A worthwhile upgrade!!

Nice one Dave.
I'm just awaiting some extra ram to give my laptop a boost 4Gb to 8Gb but thats as much as i can go unfortunately,I will see if things speed up at the weekend when uploading 400/500 image files can't be any slower than it is at the moment?.

Paul

[Tigger]

Re: A worthwhile upgrade!!

Nice upgrade Dave

When I had a Windows machine I used to hate doing anything inside the box other than blowing the dust out every now and then - I did upgrade the memory & graphics card once and was really worried about it especially as most of these things have slots and clips that need a lot of force to get them to snap in place - And the first time around did snap it

Now with an Mac I don't even think about opening it

[AndyMulhearn]

Re: A worthwhile upgrade!!

You can't beat replacing a spinning disk with an SSD for giving performance a lift. My wife has one of the last spinning disk MacBook Pros and compared to my SSD based Air it's horribly slow to start some apps. I may well get an upgrade for her with an aftermarket SSD jus to show what the kit can really do...

[MX5]

Re: A worthwhile upgrade!!

You are starting with a good processor (the i7) so maxing the RAM (limited by OS and/or Motherboard) is a cost effective starting point. Follow this with a good quality 512GB SSHD (look at reviews ... they aren't all the same ...) for your boot disk. Also use the SSHD for your applications scratch disk (like PS, DXO etc). Your data (say photos, movies, 'office' documents etc. are best kept on another HDD (or even another quality SSHD if you've less than 1TB of data [SSHD start costing serious money > 1TB]) ... which should be kept backed up in near real time to yet another device ... as previously discussed here).

Acronis (as used by the OP) and their ilk provide a no-nonsense way to clone an extant disk to a new disk.

But it's actually not a daft idea to reinstall Windows every 18-24 months if that's not too much faff for you.