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Converted Laptop to SSD


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I have an Acer Aspire R3 131T Windows 10 Celeron N3050 Dual Core 1.6/2.16GHz flip laptop which has a normal keyboard and can be folded 360 degrees to become an 11.6" tablet.

 

Its a great little machine for use away from home.

 

It came with a 500 Gb HD and 2 Gb of memory which restricted its performance more than a little.

 

A few months ago I installed 8 Gb memory instead of the 2 Gb - which made a noticeable difference. However I was left to wonder how much the standard hard drive held it back.

 

I ordered a 500 Gb Crucial SSD yesterday which arrived this morning and it has taken me most of the day getting it installed and working.

 

Being gullible - I understood from the Acronis bumf that it was easy to clone the existing hard drive to the new SSD.

 

It isn't.

 

I have Acronis 2016 installed and the instructions are to plug a SATA/USB adapter lead into the new drive, plug it into the laptop USB3 port, fire up Acronis, select "Clone" and it would turn the  new SSD into a bootable replica of the existing hard drive.

 

It didn't.

 

First off you have to activate and format the new SSD - they don't tell you this.  After doing this and starting over again - part way through the cloning process Acronis needs to re-boot the computer - which it does. But it fails to continue with the cloning process after the computer re-boots and the clone fails.

 

So after much googling it mentions on the Acronis web site that for a laptop you must install the SSD in the laptop and connect the old Hard drive via USB. After doing this you discover that this doesn't work either.

 

More Googling reveals that the re-boot problem is caused by having a card reader built into the laptop which you have to disable - which I did. This didn't resolve the problem and the computer still didn't complete the cloning after the reboot.

 

More Googling suggested that with some laptops you could only clone the HD to an SSD by using the Acronis Emergency media to boot the computer and them clone the disk. I have a memory stick loaded with Acronis and the laptop configured to boot from the USB before the HD - so this was the set up which eventually worked.

 

So my laptop now has more memory and an SSD instead of a conventional hard drive.  But was it all worth it?

 

Well - it kept me amused for the best part of today and it added to my fund of knowledge.

 

Before swapping the drives I had timed some of the operations to make a comparison after the conversion.

This is the result.

 

After pressing the start button on the laptop :-

  The user name appears in 17 seconds (was 32 seconds)
  The desktop appears in 38 seconds (was 68 seconds)
  The desktop is fully loaded in 56 seconds (was 104 seconds)

  Shut down is 11 seconds (was 14 seconds)

 

Loading Word takes 5 seconds (was 9 seconds)
Loading Excel takes 4 seconds (was 7 seconds)
Loading I.E takes 4 seconds (was 8 seconds)
Loading Edge takes 4 seconds (was 5 seconds)
Loading Firefox takes 7 seconds (was 11 seconds)
Loading File Explorer takes 2 seconds (was 3 seconds)
Loading CCleaner takes 3 seconds (was 5 seconds)

 

So I have enjoyed a full day's pleasure sorting out the problem and probably saved myself about 2 minutes per day hereafter waiting whilst stuff loads. With a pocket £120 lighter.

 

Other than feeling that glow of success - it wasn't really worth the bother.

 

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  • 1 month later...

but she's cute, -pops-... lol :wub:

 

Edit: As for SSDs... I have them in every machine; laptops anyway (2 thinkpads an HP and a Dell). Wont go back.

@ Al. Are you using manufacturers SSD optimizer? Just to make sure trim, defrag, superfetch an the like are enabled/disabled.... Makes a difference. :)

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On 11/13/2016 at 2:27 AM, AlanHo said:

Regarding defrag - I have read it makes no difference with an SSD - because random search is so much faster than the transfer rate.

Sorry: Working six days a week and find it difficult to to frequent the forum as often as I would like.

And yessir... defrag is definitely disabled on SSDs. Heck; I never used it with platter HDDs unless i noticed undue lag and hard drive thrashing. As we pretty much use the same programs without a lot of installs/uninstalls... the only content that is put upon my drives are transferred over to other media for safe keeping and then deleted: So basically no need for defrag is my understanding.

Rarely do i download onto an SSD: I have a 64GB SD card in one machine for downloaded content. The other machines have secondary HDD for this purpose.

The link supplied is very informative and enlightening. Thanks. :)

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