Hey guys, Jarrod here and today we’re going to take a look at breathing some new life
into a laptop that’s almost a decade old on a budget.
I bought this Dell laptop for uni in early 2008, at the time it was great and had awesome
specs.
Now it weighs a ton and struggles to perform basic tasks when opening current programs.
Honestly I’m not too sure what to do with it, as I haven’t used it in years and have
no use for it as it’s simply too far outdated for me.
I was considering donating it, however it feels like a crime to even give something
away that performs so terribly, so let’s see what we can do to speed it up and improve
it.
First let’s establish a baseline so we can measure the difference our changes make later.
For this test I’ve installed a fresh copy of Windows 10.
As you can see here, it takes 1 minute and 33 seconds to fully boot into Windows 10,
open up FireFox, and load my YouTube channel page.
This is far from being a perfect test, there are many variables such as how fast I am able
to log in and open FireFox.
It is however as real world as I can get, and I tried my best to do the tasks as fast
as I could to reduce those variables as much as possible.
As you may have suspected, this ancient laptop is using an old spinning rust hard drive.
It’s a 320GB disk from 2007 that runs at 5,400RPM - Ouch!
This is definitely a bottleneck in the system, so let’s replace it.
I happened to have a 6 year old spare 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD laying around which is by
no means new, I can assure you it’s seen a lot of use over the years and I’m honestly
not sure how it’s still going given the high failure rate these things had.
So I’ll get to work on taking out the old and installing the new.
Brand new SSD's of this size can be picked up on Amazon for a little over $30 USD that
are much faster and higher quality than this one here, I'll leave a link in the video description
if you're interested.
This is great value and a fairly cheap upgrade, for just 30 bucks we can breathe fresh life
into an otherwise poorly performing machine.
Also keep in mind that this will depend on the type of laptop you have, I’d suggest
checking in advance if it has removable components that can be upgraded before buying any new
hardware.
Alright now that we’ve got our SSD installed with the same operating system and programs
installed let’s run the test again.
I also want to note that both tests were performed with clean installs of Windows 10 which were
fully up to date at the time of recording, and with the same version of FireFox which
was also fully up to date.
With the SSD the test completes 2.4 times faster!
Yeah yeah, that’s an alright improvement I hear you say, but what more can we do?
Unfortunately changing out the CPU isn’t an option here, and upgrading the RAM will
likely help very little.
Windows is by no means a light operating system, so what if we install Linux instead?
Given the low powered hardware we’re dealing with here I was interested to perform the
same test except we’ll boot a Linux based operating system rather than Windows and see
if that gives us any further speed increases.
I’ve used a full desktop installation of Fedora Linux to perform the same test.
With the spinning rust hard drive, it took 1 minute and 59 seconds to fully boot up and
load the browser, so 26 seconds longer than under Windows.
With the SSD, the test completed in 42 seconds, so 4 seconds longer than the same test under
Windows 10.
So although the improvement with the SSD was 2.8 times faster than the spinning rust disk,
which is more of an improvement than we saw with Windows, overall both times were slower
than compared to the tests under Windows 10.
To be honest I was a little surprised by this, I expected Linux to perform a little better
however this was not the case here.
Of course there are lighter weight Linux operating systems out there that likely would perform
faster than Windows, however I chose Fedora as it’s a pretty widely used Linux desktop
operating system, plus I’m personally more familiar with Red Hat based distributions.
Perhaps I could investigate this further in an operating system comparison video, let
me know if you’d be interested in that.
So in conclusion, for around $30 we’ve turned a laptop that was basically unusable by today’s
standards into something that is capable of actually performing real tasks again within
a more acceptable time frame.
While Windows performed the test faster, with the SSD Linux wasn’t too far behind, and
in both cases the SSD performed more than twice as fast.
As more and more apps are becoming web based we can start to rely on desktop apps that
are tied to a specific operating system less and less.
As for games, while there are lots of games in Steam available for Linux this laptop doesn’t
exactly have the best GPU so I’ve left gaming tests out of this.
With this simple and cheap SSD upgrade you can easily speed up an old laptop on the cheap,
it’s one of the best bang for buck methods of increasing performance with old hardware.
Let me know down in the comments if any of you guys have had success upgrading old hardware
like this, what did you do and how successful was it?
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