Some time ago, I noticed that our family PC was running really slowly. It only has 4GB of RAM and sometimes the boys leave their flash-based websites open when they switch users (which can be a resource hog), but it was more than that (4GB should have been enough really). \u00a0I dug a little deeper and found that the disk was running at a constant 100% – clearly that was the bottleneck!<\/p>\n
I adjusted the virtual disk settings (away from the Windows defaults, which were pitifully small, to something I found recommended on the ‘net<\/a>) and, whilst it helped with the system responsiveness, the disk queue was still sitting a little higher than I expected (in Resource Monitor) and Task Manager still said the disk\u00a0was running at 100%.<\/p>\n Fast forward a few weeks and I’d been busy, the machine had been upgraded to Windows 10 and it seemed to be behaving itself. That was\u00a0until, one Saturday morning, when I\u00a0was just rushing out of the door to take the kids to football, I spotted the PC sitting on the kitchen counter with a boot error, followed by a failed attempt to boot from the network. “That’s great!”, I thought (actually it was some rather more grumpy words than that), “another job to fit into an already-packed\u00a0weekend…”.<\/p>\n As it happened, I’d already been considering a solid state disk (SSD) upgrade after a customer had told me about the unit\u00a0he had bought, the performance difference it had made, and how low the prices were. Our hard disk drive (HDD) failure just forced the point and I bought a 120GB\u00a0Samsung EVO 850 SSD for only marginally more than the cost of a replacement 500GB Seagate Momentum Thin HDD (we don’t really need that much space anyway).<\/p>\n Why the EVO 850? Well, my customer had already done his homework, but the 256GB version was recently rated as a best budget SSD buy on Tom’s Hardware<\/a> – and that was enough for me to buy its baby cousin.<\/p>\n I didn’t have time to fit the drive this week, but I set to work this afternoon, following the advice in the video below to take our laptop apart and swap the drive:<\/p>\n