Old Laptops Become Usable Again With SSDs

[skykaptain]

64-128 is all I need in a laptop. I got my desktop for heavy needs.

 

[rbarone69]

I bought 9x160gb X-25m (Gen 2) for my developers. My system has no more of the operating system aging affects... best $500 per dev we've ever invested.

It actually saves us money putting them into the systems due to long compile times with a regular HD.

 

[anamaniac]

[citation][nom]JEVERSON[/nom]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.[/citation]
for $200, you cna get a sweet Intel x18-m 80GB 1.8" SSD (less performance than 2.5" line though).
=D

XP still works fine on a machine with 256MB of RAM and a 1GHz CPU.

 

[jawshoeaw]

Some real bonehead comments on this thread. Any of you actually try this? We decided against replacing my wife's aging Sony Z1a - 1.3GHz Pentium mobile and instead put a 30GB SSD ($100 from Amazon). All I can say is the transformation was amazing. The laptop boots in under 10 seconds so we don't even hibernate anymore, it's faster to just shutdown/reboot. Apps fly open, it's been a better experience than I've had on any computer, never mind laptop. Now of course it's not a gaming laptop. This was an IDE drive, which kinds of sucks for future use, but in the end, it meant keeping the laptop and saving the $500-800 we probably would have spent on a new one.

Runs XP Home with 768MB RAM (mobo max). 30GB to be honest seems like tons of room, even after a bunch of music and photos were loaded. I did a bunch of tweaks recommended by various websites and run a caching program continuously that I think lumps writes together somehow (can't remember name). There are never any stutters or freezes. VM is off, although I've tried setting it to different amounts and didn't notice any difference. I still enjoy showing off to people how quickly the laptop responds and I wish I could afford to upgrade the rest of the computer in the house to SSD for boot drives.

 

[jawshoeaw]

Forgot to add - completely silent laptop now. We also bought new battery for $60 so total upgrade cost $160. Since the battery is new I can't comment on any extended run time due to the SSD. With the double capacity battery though we get easily 5-7 hours of use with reasonable settings. The old centrinos and the Sony Z1a in particular were frugal with the juice.

 

[masterjaw]

Nice add-on but that doesn't gonna compensate for the lack of CPU power and RAM.

 

[hemelskonijn]

My laptop runs on a celeron 2.6Ghz and aside from the battery (that died a long time ago) it worked well as a mobile workstation using 1,5 Gig's of ram.

It even ran windows 7 and WoW at speeds that wont make you want to kill yourself.
However the ram died and PC-133 SODIMM are about as expensive as a cheap SSD for this machine.

In conclusion i would have loved to extend this laptops live with an SSD however getting new RAM at 60 euro and a SSD at 119 euro totals a whooping 179 euro ... a nice acer extensa 5230 (essentially 16x faster then my current machine to start with) costs only 275 euro.

 

[mitch074]

I really wonder about that - why use SSDs? A modern, regular hard drive will bring it back to life for a fraction of the cost. I did it to a 10 years-old laptop that, outfitted with 384 Mb of RAM and Xubuntu, and it can now run Google Earth like a much more modern netbook, browse the Web fairly well, open pictures and SD movies fairly well too. In short, what one would use an old computer for, except it boots fast, doesn't make you wait for ages to open an app, and if anything, its price has been paid for 3 times over - you may then consider it 'buying a netbook for a HD price': 60 bucks or less.

Knowing this, it is also possible, when the laptop finally dies, to recover the HD (if you take an average one with large cache, it may still be under warranty), put it in an USB enclosure (ten bucks) and then use it as external storage for a DSL box (no need for external power), carry it with you as a huge USB key (modern laptop drives are very sturdy), use it in yet another recovered laptop, whatever.

 

[zak_mckraken]

If I had a laptop that needed to be "revived", I would consider this as an option because, the day the laptop would ultimately die, I could use the SSD again in another machine. If you can get a good deal on a fast, big but affordable SSD, such an investment is never wasted.

 

[DrKnife]

They actually do have IDE SSD drives. OCZ makes them as well as a couple of others.

 

[roagie]

I don't know if anyone else has tried this but I purchased a netbook on EBAY with a 16 gb ssd for a fairly small amount of money. Upgraded it to a 120 SATA drive then resold it on EBAY basically taking little or no profit on the transaction but walking away with a 16GB SSD. I then installed it on my desktop as the C: with the OS on it and everything else on my 320gb SATA, I've noticed some modest gains in performance but nothing to scream about. Just wondering anyone else try partitioning this way?

 

[matt87_50]

[citation][nom]blackbyron[/nom]I'll wait until SSD provides a lot more capacity with much affordable price just like the regular hard drives.[/citation]

well you'll be waiting a while....

 

[JonnyDough]

Using NLite to strip Windows down and then turning off things like recovery and the indexing service can help breathe life into an old laptop as well, especially if it came pre-installed with OEM software. It's amazing what can happen when I rebuild systems for friends who already have enough ram but have been using the same Windows XP PC for about 8 years.