Solved! Will SDD save my laptop?

[frugaltechie]

I have a 5-6 year old Dell Inspiron 14R (N4110) that I use for light tasks. Task manager often shows my disk at 100% and performance grinds to a halt. Is it worth updating to a SDD? My specs are as follows:

Intel HM67 chipset
Intel Core i3 2310M 2.1Ghz
4GB RAM DDR3 (2x2)
500 GB HDD @5400RPM
Intel HD Graphics 3000
Windows 10

 

[Saga Lout]

You need a larger disk and a SSD will either be smaller in capacity than your 500GB spinning disk or it would cost a fortune. You could buy a SSD and install the Windows system on then use the existing disk in a USB caddy. Wipe thet system of iut and you'll have plenty more space.

Have you used Windows cleaner to free up some space? In a Command form, preferably as Administrator, type CleannMgr and hit he Enter key. A small form pops up and calculates how much space you can free up. Accept the offer to clean it all off and see how much you will gain.

 

[frugaltechie]

You need a larger disk and a SSD will either be smaller in capacity than your 500GB spinning disk or it would cost a fortune. You could buy a SSD and install the Windows system on then use the existing disk in a USB caddy. Wipe thet system of iut and you'll have plenty more space.

Have you used Windows cleaner to free up some space? In a Command form, preferably as Administrator, type CleannMgr and hit he Enter key. A small form pops up and calculates how much space you can free up. Accept the offer to clean it all off and see how much you will gain.

Thanks for the reply Saga. Why do you think I need a larger drive? To clarify, when I say that disk is at 100% in task manager, I believe that means it is utilizing all of it's read/write capacity, not that the drive is full. I'm currently only using about 130GB of the 500 GB available on my current drive, so not limited on space. I was just thinking that the hard drive is slow to read/write with a standard drive at 5400RPM, and thought a SDD might address that. With that said, I can probably clean up the existing drive.

Another thing that's not clear to me is what is using up the current 130GB of space. My documents and pictures only add up to about 6 GB and I don't have that many programs installed.

 

[Saga Lout]

In those circumstances, open an Administrator Command form and run CleanMgr then accept to get rid of everything in the list which may take a long time to appear.

It's possible the disk has a problem so running checkdisk /r to fix any errors it finds.

 

[brianhutchins95]

You need a larger disk and a SSD will either be smaller in capacity than your 500GB spinning disk or it would cost a fortune. You could buy a SSD and install the Windows system on then use the existing disk in a USB caddy. Wipe thet system of iut and you'll have plenty more space.

Have you used Windows cleaner to free up some space? In a Command form, preferably as Administrator, type CleannMgr and hit he Enter key. A small form pops up and calculates how much space you can free up. Accept the offer to clean it all off and see how much you will gain.

Thanks for the reply Saga. Why do you think I need a larger drive? To clarify, when I say that disk is at 100% in task manager, I believe that means it is utilizing all of it's read/write capacity, not that the drive is full. I'm currently only using about 130GB of the 500 GB available on my current drive, so not limited on space. I was just thinking that the hard drive is slow to read/write with a standard drive at 5400RPM, and thought a SDD might address that. With that said, I can probably clean up the existing drive.

Another thing that's not clear to me is what is using up the current 130GB of space. My documents and pictures only add up to about 6 GB and I don't have that many programs installed.

with your laptop being 5-6 years old, your hard drive is probably on the way out, especially if you're using 100% hard disk usage. That's one tale-tale sign that your hard drive could be failing, I suggest backing everything up as a precaution. At idle, and no running background tasks opened, your hard drive should NOT even exceed 5% usage if that.

As far as the hard drive usage, check for old windows restore points and delete them. I have ran across customer's computers that had anywhere from 8-20gb of nothing but old windows restore points that they didn't need. I would keep about the last weeks worth, anything older than that is probably not needed. You can download AVG Tuneup and it will keep your system cleaned, including those restore points, as well as web browser info like temporary internet files.

Another thing you might be running into are programs that start when windows starts. AVG Tuneup will allow you to close down those programs, as well as any programs running in the background. You should download it from AVG.com, scroll to the very bottom, and click on tuneup. download and install it, and then run the program.

 

[frugaltechie]

When idle the drive utilization is <5%. The drive is only at 100% usage shortly after booting and when doing upgrades, scanning for viruses, etc. Unfortunately, this seems like every time I need to use the computer since I only boot it up a few times a week at most. My goal is to have the computer be able to complete these tasks in the background while I'm still able to use the computer for my desired task. As of right now, I have to boot the computer, let it do it's thing for 10-15 minutes, then go about my business.