Really the first thing you should do is increase the ram, this will give you the biggest boost How much ram can the laptop hold ? That will prevent most all disk swapping which is what really slows a system down, and less swapping would decrease wear if you do get an ssd. An ssd will shorten your boot time, but not by much with the latest systems, my centos 7 boots in about a minute from HDD. It will also decrease loading times for programs from disk, but how many programs do you start up in a day? You may gain a few minutes but not an hour or two. If you are writing lots of data, this will speed up because the writes are much faster than an HDD, but then you start wearing out the disk faster. Ssd's are good for increasing transactions per second like in a database, some place where lots of reads and writes are going on. If you're a big company you can afford to buy lots of ssd's and get the benefit of all that throughput. If you are reading email and browsing and maybe some libre office, I don't really think it pays to get an ssd for your system disk. If you want to compare them, get a cheap 128gb and duplicate it to an HDD and spend a week on each. See how much time you gain. On Feb 29, 2016 9:09 PM, "Stephen Partington" wrote: > But not an inconceivable amount more. I mainly suggest it because of the > warranty. > On Feb 29, 2016 8:06 PM, "Keith Smith" wrote: > >> Thank you for your feedback Stephen!! >> >> I assume you are recommending Samsung Evo 850? >> >> I was looking at the Kingston because of price. One of the ratings said >> Kingston was not as fast as others. You said "Samsung Evo 850....(they are >> also wicked fast)". >> >> The cost more too. >> >> >> >> On 2016-02-29 09:44, Stephen Partington wrote: >> >>> The lifespan will depend entirely on the number of Writes the drive >>> will incur. The first thing you want to do once the Os is installed is >>> to reduce this. If you have enough ram and are comfortable with nos >>> wap go for it. If you want the backup i would suggest pushing >>> swappiness all the way over so that it is used only if there is no >>> ram. >>> >>> Most SSD's will give you a 3 year warranty. Samsung with their Evo 850 >>> drives and the new vnand are offering 5 year warranty. (they are also >>> wicked fast). >>> >>> That being said. with minimal writes I have seen older SSD's last for >>> much longer than their supplied 3 year warranty (I have one that is >>> pushing 6 right now). >>> >>> With an SSD the general user experience will be pretty good, but >>> Anytime you run updates it will still crawl, regardless fo the SSD :-) >>> >>> On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 8:49 AM, Keith Smith >>> wrote: >>> >>> Hi, >>>> >>>> I have an older laptop. Not sure when I bought it. I'm thinking I >>>> bought it before 2009, however the CPU is an AMD 3300M which >>>> according to what I am reading was not in production until 2011. It >>>> has 4G of RAM and a 500GB HD. It's running Win7, which is a little >>>> slow. >>>> >>>> I was thinking of replacing the HD with an SSD and potentially >>>> making it into a "Chromebook".... (Thunderbird/Libre Office/ Chrome >>>> Browser) I'm reading the SSD's are 10x faster than the HD. There >>>> has been prior discussions about breathing life into old hardware by >>>> replacing the HD with SSD and installing Linux (now we are on >>>> topic). >>>> >>>> Initially I was thinking a small SSD since I will probably never >>>> use this laptop in production... But you never know. If these mods >>>> work out I might dual boot it - Win7 / Mint 17 KDE. >>>> >>>> Newegg is selling a 240G Kingston SSD for $65 which is probably way >>>> more storage than I would ever need. >>>> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820721108 [1] >>>> >>>> What type of lifespan should I expect for an SSD with moderate >>>> usage? >>>> >>>> Anything specific I should be looking at? >>>> >>>> Thank you so much for your help!! >>>> >>>> -- >>>> Keith Smith >>>> --------------------------------------------------- >>>> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org >>>> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: >>>> http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss [2] >>>> >>> >>> -- >>> >>> A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from >>> rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button. >>> >>> Stephen >>> >>> >>> >>> Links: >>> ------ >>> [1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820721108 >>> [2] http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss >>> >>> --------------------------------------------------- >>> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org >>> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: >>> http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss >>> >> >> -- >> Keith Smith >> --------------------------------------------------- >> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org >> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: >> http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss >> > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss >