[SOLVED] Broken motherboard connector

[snipester90]

Hi all,

Today i set about opening up my friend's (extremely budget) laptop to give it a good clean and upgrade its horribly underpowered 4 gb of Ram . I came about a cable that connects the storage solutions (HDD, DVD drive) to the Mobo. Unaware of the type of connector (thought it was a typical ribbon cable clip) i tried pulling on the top of it and there it went a small piece of it! I finished repasting the thing and installing the RAM (i had a spare 8gb stick lying around after upgrading my own gaming laptop) and here's what happened:

1st boot: bios error, the mobo did not recognize any HDDs installed, no boot device.

Opened up the laptop again, put in the cable in that broken connector with a bit more force and booted up the laptop again and

2nd boot: the thing worked, it took a while for Windows to load up but it got there.

Now, Windows seems just as slow as before the RAM upgrade if not slower under any load (the hard drive is ALWAYS at 100% in task manager, problem which was present even before the RAM upgrade), which is extremely unexpected given its now 12 Gigs of ram available (they are available, yes, i checked).

Could it be the broken connector is slowing down the read/write speeds of the HDD?

Pics of the mishap:

https://ibb.co/j3zvDy2

IMG-20201016-193112 hosted at ImgBB

Image IMG-20201016-193112 hosted in ImgBB

ibb.co

https://ibb.co/Jjq557v

 

[jojesa]

Adding RAM will make a computer to seem faster on certain types of operations only
If you are opening many programs or many tabs in a browser like Chrome and you PC is running out RAM and it is swapping data between the HDD and RAM then it make sense to add RAM.
Adding more RAM in this case eliminates the need to "swap" programs in and out, thus making the PC faster.
If the user is not even utilizing the available RAM and the system is slow, adding more RAM won't speed up a PC.

That laptop might need is a disk upgrade.
Going from HDD to a SSD will definitely make that laptop faster.
It will boot faster and programs will open faster.
It could also improve internet speed, if you disk cannot keep up with download speeds.

 

[snipester90]

I'm sure of that however it's not for me to decide as it's someone else's laptop.

My question was if breaking off that top part of the connector could have impacted in some way hdd transfer speeds.

 

[jojesa]

I'm sure of that however it's not for me to decide as it's someone else's laptop.

My question was if breaking off that top part of the connector could have impacted in some way hdd transfer speeds.

Place some tape to hold the ribbon, since it could be loose.
What was the HDD speed before and after you broke the little plastic piece?