How to make your old laptop surprisingly fast.

 Hello guys, This is TechCS again with some new content for yall. And this is the first of our new upgrading series. And this is the 1st time I'm........ Okay! not the first. Still this is an isolated post and a new series starts with this. Last time it was somehow related to Virtual Machine. So guys and gals, let's see what I have got for you guys here.

So, this time we are gonna see how to upgrade your laptop or old laptop (yeah, new ones don't need that much upgrading and most of them aren't that upgradable.) Moreover don't think that this will make your laptop new.

So I'd be discussing 5 ways to increase the performance of an old laptop. Moreover we'll keep in mind that it should be worth (Means you know Budget)

Prerequisites -

  • Obviously an old laptop.
  • A budget around $100 (Depends upon your requirements)
  • A bit of paitence.

Included laptops- 

Sandy bridge 
Ivy bridge
Some Nehalem/westmere

1. Get a Solid state drive(SSD)

This is the most important thing to do. Most of the old laptops which we are talking about would be supporting 2.5 inch SATA or at max mSATA. These will make your laptop booting speed far better. But, Don't throw away the hard drive. Get a hard disk caddy and replace your Optical drive.

                                                            credits- intel germany

I'm providing links them here- ( The links of less capacity drives will be provided at the end.)

2.5 inch SATA

1. Samsung 860 Evo-    Best performer in all of them.
  • Seq. read speeds - 550 Mb/s
  • Seq write speeds - 515 -520 Mb/s
  • VNAND technology
Amazon.com - get it here (1 TB)
Amazon.in -   get it here   (1 TB)
Amazon.com - get it here  (500 GB)
Amazon.in - get it here       (500 GB)

** I'm not mentioning 256 GB here, as it doesn't worth spending much money. You should rather go for WD,Crucial or kingston 500 GB ones. **

All the links are affiliate.

2. Crucial MX500 - 2TB model is the best one.
  • Seq. Read speed - 560 Mb/s
  • Seq Write speed - 510 Mb/s
  • 3D NAND tech.
Amazon.com - here (1 TB)
Amazon.com - here  (500 GB)
Amazon.in -  here (1 TB)
Amazon.in -  here  (500 GB)

All the links are affiliate.

3. WD BLUE -  Value for money
  • Seq. Read - 560 MB/s
  • Seq. write - 530 MB/s
  • 3D NAND tech
Amazon.com - here  (1 TB)
Amazon.com - here (500 GB)
Amazon.in - here (1 TB)
Amazon.in - here (500 GB)

mSATA SSD

Guys, these days these SSDs are not that common and we can find very irrelevent prices in the market. There are some m.2 to mSATA adapters but haven't checked them until. I'll be writting a review about them very soon. Still I'd be linking some of them but personally I haven't tested them except one. If anybody uses such kinda adapters, please let me know. Moreover if you are outside the US, In my opinion you'd better off with Aliexpress than amazon. 

Check them out below -

1. Kingspec mSATA (128G) -

2. Kingston 480G mSATA -

3. Samsung PM851 512G mSATA -

  • Amazon (Performance) (A used product I think)

2. Get a Hard drive Caddy (If you got a DVD bay)

This is very useful if you got your old hard drive. Even you can get a new 2.5 inch SATA ssd but it's best use is to use with your old hdd which you got in your main bay (Easy, why to spend getting a 1 TB SSD for storage.)


 If you don't have an ultrabay then don't bother about this. I'm joting down some links -
Yeah, links are above, but you better know the size. If you have any issues, then comment below or contact me directly.

3. Get an express card to USB 3.0.

If you got an old laptop you must have an express card slot. It can be used for many purposes such as using USB 3.0 or connecting an egpu. I'm describing USB 3.0 adapter here. If you want to know more about egpu, just let me know. I'll write a post on that. 
If your laptop lacks USB 3.0 which many of Sandy systems do, get this.....

What does express card do?
This is a question which many of us don't know and even don't want to. The reason is simple : It is due to the fact that is a legacy port which was found in pre 2013 laptops. This was later replaced by Thunderbolt 3. Still it has a lot of uses. I'll tell you about this in the next post which will revolve around this only. In brief it is a pcie 1x slot. Using this you can connect USB3 ports, egpu, nvme ssd(Theoretically, Few controllers are developed until now) and many more. 

I'm linking a few express card to usb 3.0 below -

4. Add more RAM

This is one of the most important things. Your laptop can be terribly slow if it doesn't have sufficient RAM. So in order to increase performance add more RAM. Basically 8 Gigs of RAM is enough for most users. Since your Laptop supports DDR 3 you can upgrade it two 16 gigs if you got 2 slots. If you got more then you can have more RAM too.


So this is one of the most important things to do. Check out some of the best options available -

Final Words-

Okay guys, this was enough for this article, I'll be coming with more articles in this series. Here we talked about upgrading your old laptop those option I've mentioned are all good performing. There are some more thing which I'll be dealing in the next articles. Don't forget to share this post if you liked it. If you want to support me then please use any of those affiliate links when buying some stuff. 

In the next post we are doing Arch Linux installation. Be sure to check it out. If you got to know about some new stuff or if you followed any of those methods then hit me a quick reply below.

Thanks for reading :)

TechCS



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