A few months ago, I realized that my 6 years old laptop had become rather inadequate for my needs. Everything was moving in slow motion, whether it was internet pages or office documents.
I'd bought this Acer Travelmate 7720 laptop back in September 2007 as a desktop replacement. It featured a 17" WXGA+ display, Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 CPU at 2.2 GHz (Merom), 2GB RAM, ATI HD 2400 XT graphics subsystem and a 250GB hard disk. At that time, the Travelmate 7720 was a rather top-class laptop costing about 1200€. Now, it was showing its age.
At first, I went shopping for a new laptop. I quickly realized that if I wanted to stay at 17", the prices were somewhat high. So I started looking at upgrade options.
CPU upgrade, of course, wasn't an option. RAM upgrade to 4GB on the other hand was quite feasible. But would it be enough? Some more searching in the user's guide revealed that this laptop supported a second hard disk. A quick glance at the bottom verified this.
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| Acer Travelmate 7720 bottom view 1: Secondary hard disk bay, 7: Primary hard disk bay |
That was a very promising option. My plan was to add an SSD (Solid State Drive) where I could freshly install the operating system.
So I went ahead and opened the cover of the secondary bay just to discover that there was no visible connector for the second hard disk. Searching the Internet, I found the service manual for the Travelmate 7720 which helped a lot. Following the instructions in the service manual, I removed the big cover next to the secondary bay which uncovered the SATA and power connectors for the second hard disk.
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| Power (left) and SATA (right) connectors for the second hard disk |
The only problem was that the power connector was a non standard 2-pin connector. So there should be some kind of a special cable to connect the second hard disk. A bit more Internet searching and I came across the notebookreview.com forum where someone had discovered the Acer part number for this special cable!
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| The special 2nd hdd cable |
The real surprise came when I found out that the cable was available at a local spare parts distributor for only 4,85€! It didn't take me long to also locate a pair of 2GB DIMMs at 52€ and a 64GB SSD at only 65€.
After putting all the new hardware in the laptop, I did a fresh install of 64-bit Windows 7 on the SSD disk. I opted for the 64-bit version so I could take advantage of the whole 4GB of RAM.
The improvement in performance was obvious. Having both the OS and my user profile on the SSD, resulted in a whole lot better user experience. No more waiting for applications, documents, pages etc. to load. Response is almost immediate. The laptop's start up time has also decreased significantly. From power on to desktop takes about 30 seconds, whereas without the SSD took over a minute. It's just like having a new laptop and all this for only 121,85€ !
Conclusion
Migrating from a hard drive to an SSD is, by far, the single most important upgrade you can make to any computer in order to achieve a substantial improvement in performance. Complementing this with a RAM upgrade, can make a huge difference.