Late last week, I was thinking about this old XP laptop we have that used to be my wife's, back before she went back to school for her master's and needed something a little more modern. What with XP finally going the way of the dinosaurs*, it seemed kind of silly for a perfectly good (if somewhat superannuated) Dell laptop to go join the several old desktop boxes in the "we'll do something with these someday" pile.
So I took stock of what we had. Core 2 Duo processor, decent peripherals although the screen is one of those tiny 720-pixel-high bastards that Dell foisted on people looking for a cheaper deal, otherwise works well if sluggishly. Supposedly doesn't support Windows 7, except that it does. So I thought, how about replacing the hard drive with an SSD, adding a couple of gigs of RAM (it had 2, it now has 4), and springing for a copy of Windows 7 Pro 32-bit? (I didn't want to chance the thing breaking with the 64-bit version. For what we'll be using it for, the 32-bit version is plenty.)
So about $300 later (ouch, too bad I had to buy RAM), I spent a couple of hours yesterday installing everything and pulling down the massive megabytage of Windows 7 updates that have come out since SP1.
The result? The machine boots from a cold start to a login screen in 30 seconds, and you're logged in about 25 seconds after that.
This from a box that I don't think ever actually stopped booting any time I fired it up…which is probably due in most part to the SSD (which got a 7.8 out of 7.9 in the Windows Experience Index test — the whole box itself only got a 3.1, due to crappy "business graphics") and the added RAM, which is keeping it from paging to disk incessantly.
If you've got an old sluggish laptop, I can definitely recommend, at minimum, upgrading the hard drive to SSD technology. More RAM is good, too, but 4GB is probably plenty unless you're running a compiler or something. My only concern about SSD is that SSD drives have an upper limit on the number of write operations they'll support to any given memory location over the lifetime of the device. But that limit is high enough that it probably won't matter in the lifetime of your machine, and of course you make regular backups, right?
And I'm thinking a solid-state drive is going to have a better chance of surviving a drop than a spinning standard hard drive, too.
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* Much to the plaintive dismay of a lot of ham radio operators, but that's what they get for not forcing their software vendors to get with the program and modernize for Windows 7 and 64-bitness — jeez, what a bunch of whiny clingers.