Laptop Upgrades Are Possible.
Many years ago, I started work for a computer retailer. (I won’t say which). We were trained to tell customers buying laptops that upgrades are not available for laptops. While this was largely true, laptop upgrades were possible with a RAM increase. Things have changed a bit now though, there are more upgrades available now for laptops than ever before. Let’s explore…
RAM or ‘Memory’. - (Speed)
Most laptops a now sold with a minimum of 4GB of RAM. As you go higher into the price range, you may see RAM offers of 8GB, 12GB or even 16GB. Increasing your RAM can result in your computer being faster. Imagine for a minute you had more memory and spent less time ‘Googling’ things because you could remember more. Information would be available to you much faster. Computer memory works in an equivalent way. In terms of value for money, RAM upgrades provide a good increase for a relatively decent price.
Hard Drive. - (Data Storage)
Most laptops now come with a 500GB hard drive or better. It’s not uncommon to see hard drive offers of 1TB in a laptop, but what if we could offer a 4TB hard drive in a laptop? Pretty cool right? Better still, we could do this for under $300.
SSD Upgrade – (Speed)
Most laptops ship with spinning hard drives in the 500GB – 1TB storage capacity region. Some tablet & ultra-book computers ship with SSD drives. There are many good reasons to have an SSD drive over a spinning hard drive. Reliability, speed, weight, noise & power consumption are advantages of SSD. The downside to SSD is cost per GB is relatively high in comparison to spinning hard drives. An SSD can be up to 36 times faster than a hard drive so for that reason, we love them.
Ballan Computers installed Windows 7 onto a laptop with a spinning disk and booted it in 42 seconds. We then took the spinning disk out and installed the same Windows 7 on an SSD and the same laptop booted in 14 seconds. SSD upgrades offer the greatest speed increase on this list.
M.2 Slot – (Speed)
An 2.5” SSD drive uses no moving parts and is made to fit in a 2.5 inch casing to fit neatly into laptop computers. An M.2 slot is smaller again and plugs directly into a motherboard slot. This means an M.2 storage card can be faster again. An SSD drive can reach speeds of 600mb/s where as a M.2 drive with trickery can reach speeds of up to 4GB/s, Impressive. Before jumping to the M.2 though, you should ensure your laptop can use one.
Second Hard Drive – (Data Storage)
At the expense of your DVD drive, you can install a ‘drive caddy’ to add a new hard drive to your computer. If you are running out of space on your drive, you can simply replace your DVD drive and put in a 4TB drive with ease. What this also does is create opportunity to increase speed and storage space. An SSD drive can replace your current hard drive to make your computer faster, then the replaced spinning drive can be used as storage… Awesome!
If you’d like to speed up or boost the storage on your laptop, give us a call. We’ll give you a quote to do any of the above. We can do these upgrades onsite in the Ballarat, Ballan, Daylesford & Bacchus Marsh areas. 03 5368 2611.
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