Old Laptops Become Usable Again With SSDs

[Marcus Yam]

Breathe some new life into your notebook with an SSD.

Old Laptops Become Usable Again With SSDs : Read more

 

[blackbyron]

I'll wait until SSD provides a lot more capacity with much affordable price just like the regular hard drives.

 

[HavoCnMe]

They should of used a DMV center as the testing environment instead of CES. Maybe it could of sparked some much needed updating at most DMV's.

 

[Guest]

At $2 per GiB yes; but, at the current prices that is a definet no... laptop works just fine. Who would not like some extra speed, but not at 500 CAD for a 128 GiB SSD - don't consider 64 GiB SSD a practicle upgrade.

 

[seraphimcaduto]

you mean my dell 2650 could come to life again? This would be the 4th time I believe, since I gave up after the 3rd rebuild.

 

[Honis]

I'd get a 7200 RPM hard drive with more space for the laptop. At least when it finally gets to the point that I can no longer stand how slow the basic experience is I can turn it into a storage server.

 

[alexmx]

so, an SSD is going to compensate the lack of ram and cpu?

 

[jeverson]

Well... for $130 I can get a sweet 40Gb Intel SSD. So if I were to invest in a longer lifespan on my old laptop that would be it. Otherwise, that money may be better spent on a new nettop or entry level laptop. Am not really concerned with storage on a laptop/nettop since my desktop is my main PC and all my stuff is stored there. My nettop is mainly just for doing presentations for my business and only has a few docs and whatnot on it.

 

[cknobman]

Well my pentium M laptop is an IDE hard drive and not serial ata so i doubt I could find an ssd that would work with it.

 

[cadder]

I think most people would want more than a 32GB drive. When the 64's drop below $150 I think this would be a good upgrade.

 

[Regulas]

I don't know about Winblows but I will put a SSD drive in my Linux laptop when the original drive dies, by then they may actually be big enough and cheap enough to be worth it.

 

[aford10]

It's a good thought. But if the laptop has an ancient hard drive, it's also likely got ancient RAM and CPU to go with it.

I would consider doing this, but it'd be on a case to case basis.

 

[dark_lord69]

Ya, I need an IDE SSD...
The only ones that exist worry me that they might have the jmicon controller issue. I want a good one that I know will work. All of the good ones though are made for SATA.

 

[eurodj]

I believe at laptop prices nowdays SSD still makes no sense unless economically you can justify the upgrade IE.Autocad,rendering work,Gaming if thats ur thing,or any other way in which the ssd will proove itself usefull as for everyday normal people use i think not. SSDs will become chepaer and thus i will upgrde then but as to upgrade older machines i believe not. Im pretty sure my wife was better off getting a 500 dollar vaio with a Dual core CPU bigger HD and windows 7 than putting a ssd on her aging compaq with a pentium m and windows xp. Just my 2 cents

 

[dark_lord69]

All you need is a mini PCIe slot... which old laptops don't have...

 

[sliem]

Why spend $100-$200 to revive old slow laptop where you can get a decent BRAND NEW one for $400-500?

It's like buying a $20 ink for an old printer that only prints where new one is $60 comes with ink, that prints, scans, copies AND faxes WITH warranty.

 

[Guest]

Would you be hampered at all if your laptop only supports Sata 1.5GB/s?

 

[bak0n]

Since about all I do is gaming, an SSD in my laptops is the least of my financial concern.

 

[carpwrist]

The SSD can be put into another piece of hardware once you're done with the laptop, so it's actually a pretty solid investment.

 

[wildwell]

I'd consider upgrading to a new SSD over a new laptop.

 

[beayn]

For $100 I'd put a 30gb in my old Compaq laptop and run Windows XP on it. I wouldn't run Win7 so I'd also want drivers to support TRIM.

I wouldn't pay the prices listed here at $100 for 16gb. That's just too small.

 

[beayn]

Oh yeah it would also have to be IDE. Aren't most laptops with SATA already new enough to not require an SSD upgrade? I want my 1.6Ghz Athlon XP Compaq with 512mb RAM to be usable again...

 

[Guest]

that is why the initial eeepc's became so popular, and why the later releases with hdd got so criticized for being slow!

 

[killerclick]

Windows XP + MS Office / OpenOffice = 5.5GB
Linux Mint + OpenOffice + GIMP + everything else that comes preinstalled = 4.5GB
So I can see using a 16GB SSD but my biggest problem with old laptops is the lack of RAM and poor battery life / battery life degradation. Add a new battery and a RAM upgrade and you might as well buy a new laptop with a faster processor, better screen, better power efficiency and a warranty.

 

[arlandi]

why would you want to run new OS in an old laptops??? installing more RAM and bigger hard disk make more sense. that is if that laptop still alive...