Why most laptops are painfully slow !!
The top 3 causes of a sluggish laptop:
- Slow hard drive – Conventional laptop hard drives are really slow. Slow to load Windows, slow to run applications…just slow!!
But with a new SSD (Solid State Hard Drive) your laptop will load information faster than the most expensive Enterprise grade server hard drives. Windows will boot faster and applications will load faster – Hooray! And, as an added bonus your hard drive will be less likely to fail. Solid state drives have no moving parts and thus, are much tougher than conventional notebook drives. - Not enough Memory – Most notebooks today come with at least 4GB of memory which is an ideal amount for the vast majority of notebook users. However, if your notebook is more than a couple of years old it most likely came with 2Gb or less. If you are trying to run Windows Vista withless than 2Gb of ram you will spend more time waiting than working!
- Sluggish Operating System – Anyone out there running Vista will know what I mean! Even the comparatively speedy XP tends to slow fairly dramatically after a couple of years of use. It’s time to upgrade to Windows 7. Unlike XP or Vista, Windows 7 supports SSD hard drives natively ensuring the best performance possible. Windows 7 is also easier on system resources than Vista giving laptops with a max mmemory of 2GB a fighting chance!
If you are like most people your laptop is not running to it’s full potential – and you may not even know it.
Case Study: 2007 model HP Pavilion DV6000 laptop.
This particular machine is owned by my bookeeper. In terms of installed software it was extremely lean with just MS Office 2007, MYOB and Microsoft Security Essentials. The machine is used each day to process various businesses financial information, browse the internet and create documents in MS Office.
Specification: 1.8Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo pressor, 1Gb DDR2667 memory and Windows Vista Home Premium.
Time to boot: 2 minutes 43 seconds (time taken until it was possible to start using the machine. Does not iclude bios screen time)
Usability: In a word – terrible! I have no idea how she persisted for 3 years with this machine. MYOB took at least 32 seconds to start and was incredibly unresponsive in use. MS Word/Excel took approximately 18 seconds to open. Having both MS Office and MYOB open was virtually impossible as the machine would constantly freeze up whilst paging to the hard drive.
Step 1: Memory Boost:
The very first thing we did was give the machine a memory boost from 1Gb to 2GB – it’s maximum.
New Boot Time: 2 minutes 10 seconds (32 seconds faster)
Usability: So much better! It is now possible to have MYOB, Office and Interent Explorer open at the same time. MYOB still took 30 seconds but was reasonably responsive in use. MS Word/Excel took 14 seconds to open and ran well during use.
Step 2 & 3: New SSD Hard Drive & Windows 7:
In this step we replaced the old 120Gb Sata drive with a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 high performace SSD drive and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit. Once the installation was complete we reinstalled MS Office, MYOB and MS security Essentials.
New Boot Time: 32 seconds! (2 mintues and 10 seconds faster than it’s original state)
Usability: Now everything is fast. The machine boots in no time, MYOB & MS Word/Excel all start in 3 t o 5 seconds and everthing feels snappy. Although we did not measure it previously the laptop seems to sleep/resume almost instantly.
Overall my book keeper could not be happier. She reckons she gets twice as much done in half the time. A claim I can easily believe based on it’s original specification.
Turbocharge your Notebook with a full upgrade package!
While stocks last we are offering a discounted Notebook Turbocharging package including:
- A 60GB1 OCZ Vertex 2 high performance Solid State Drive.
- Your choice of 1gb,2gb and 4gb memory upgrades for DDR2 and DDR3 laptops at discounted prices.
- Windows 7 Home Premium 3bit or 64 bit at our cost price!. FYI - Here is a good article discussing the differences between 32 & 64 bit windows
Total Upgrade packages start at $407 inc GST. ( Pack includes 60GB OCZ SSD, Win 7 & 1Gb DDR2667 upgrade)
Notes:
- If you are unsure of which memory to choose for your laptop please call us on 07 5641 2298.
- If you want to order an SSD drive without Win 7 or without memory thats OK. We have setup the checkout to allow you to select only what you want!
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