Personal computing discussed

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Nowin
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New laptop or new HDD?

Fri Aug 20, 2010 2:19 am

So my wife's laptop is getting old. It's slow and things take forever to load. She has the Gateway MX6426. It has a decent 2.2Ghz processor, but a crappy 4200 rpm 80GB Fujitsu. I was thinking that the slowness could be due to the crappy HDD. It's possible that it's another issue, RAM or whatnot. What do you guys think? Would a new $50 hard drive do the trick, or should we get a new $600-$700 laptop?
 
Voldenuit
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Re: New laptop or new HDD?

Fri Aug 20, 2010 2:24 am

Nowin wrote:
So my wife's laptop is getting old. It's slow and things take forever to load. She has the Gateway MX6426. It has a decent 2.2Ghz processor, but a crappy 4200 rpm 80GB Fujitsu. I was thinking that the slowness could be due to the crappy HDD. It's possible that it's another issue, RAM or whatnot. What do you guys think? Would a new $50 hard drive do the trick, or should we get a new $600-$700 laptop?


The laptop isn't helped by its single core CPU, that's for sure. You also won't find many options for a PATA laptop HDD floating around these days.

Might be time for a new laptop. You could either get another desktop replacement, or if she fancies something more portable, the Thinkpad X100e (make sure you get one with a dual core CPU).
Wind, Sand and Stars.
 
FuturePastNow
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Re: New laptop or new HDD?

Fri Aug 27, 2010 6:46 am

A faster hard drive, more RAM, and a fresh Winders install would all help it, but you're talking about spending $100+ that would cover a fourth of the cost of something new.
 
Mentawl
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Re: New laptop or new HDD?

Fri Aug 27, 2010 8:47 am

I managed to revitalise an old P4 laptop by replacing its 20gb 4200rpm Toshiba with a brand new 80gb 5400rpm WD Scorpio Blue. Despite the relatively small increase in rotational speed, the newer HDD made a huge difference, with sustained reads about 3-4x faster than the old drive. Made the lappy much more usable, and my brother's been using it on a daily basis.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136129 was the drive I got, fwiw. They also do them in varying capacities upto 250gb. You'll notice a lot of the Newegg reviews talk about reviving older laptops, which I imagine is where 90% of these drives go :).

A new laptop would obviously be faster, but I would give consideration to trying the new HDD + a fresh windows install. If you're running Windows XP, the 1GB of RAM that comes as stock with the laptop shouldn't be holding you back too badly. If you're running Vista or Win7, different story!
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TheEmrys
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Re: New laptop or new HDD?

Fri Aug 27, 2010 8:57 am

It really depends on how much you want to spend, and how much laptop she needs. My wife has pretty simple tastes, so I picked up an Acer laptop 3 years ago and its been great. We paid $399 for it. Far cheaper than anything else we looked at. If she would be satisfied wtih that level of laptop, you may want to pull the trigger.
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