Finally - A New PC

Published on July 11, 2020 By kona0197 In Personal Computing

So, sadly, I choose to return the new laptop I just bought a few days ago. Thanks to my diabetic eyes I have a very hard time focusing on anything with a 15" monitor, even when I set the fonts to large. Just too bright. Looks like I need glasses but right now all of the labs that make glasses are shutdown due to Covid-19. So long story short I got my money back, went on Craigslist, picked up a 2 year old 17" notebook from a local seller. It's a 8th Gen Core I3 with 8GB of DDR4 RAM. I got it home, ran some tests, found the hard drive was on its very last leg. So I went online, purchased a 1 TB hard drive from Staples, picked it up the next day. Installing it was no issue, it was easy to tear down and install the drive. Got everything put back together, installed Windows, installed my apps, transferred my files over from a backup drive.

Then I noticed we have 500 GB SSD drives at work for $10 more. SMH...

Question is should I get the SSD and return the HDD? It's fast enough for me and works fine, but my last computer had a SSD and it was just a couple of seconds faster when booting. Not sure I want to tear the notebook down again or go through a long return process with Staples. I would also be losing 500 GB of drive space.

Thanks for the advice guys.

Comments

Jafo

on Jul 11, 2020

Potential failure for mechanical HDs in a portable device is much higher than a SSD, probably why your drive was on its last legs.

Step 1 on any 'new' Laptop...to prolong its life...max out the ram.

Step 2...add an SSD if it hasn't already got one as the OS drive.

Step 3 is solved by step 2 .... full format and lose any and all installed junk and recovery partitions.

Dcrew57

on Jul 12, 2020

I agree with SSD. No moving parts means less chance of failure plain and simple. My desktop is actualy on an SSD. 1TB.

RedneckDude

on Jul 12, 2020

I would buy a caddy and put the 1 TB in the optical drive space, for extra storage. Who needs an optical drive these days. My laptop came from the factory with an M.2 card (ssd) and a 1 TB HDD. I have it maxxed out at 32 GB ram.

admiralWillyWilber

on Jul 12, 2020

Use both

kona0197

on Jul 19, 2020

Well I went down to the store and got a 500GB SSD for the laptop. I'm currently getting 580MB read speeds and 530 write speeds. Windows and apps start up in seconds. Not bad, considering I paid around $57 for the drive. I learned it's really easy to tear the laptop down for upgrades, cleaning, and repair. Just not sure if I want to keep it because I am unsure how much life the LCD screen has left. Maybe I will finally build a budget desktop. I did order a caddy for the 1TB drive I bought earlier, gonna use it as another backup drive. I don't think having more than one backup of my data is a bad thing. Thanks guys.

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