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Please help with older laptop

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jmh547

Member
Joined
Jul 26, 2005
I have a Toshiba L745-S4210. I purchased it new for my wife about 3 or 4 years ago. Right now the only thing it is used for is light surfing and paying the bills... The computer has always been sluggish but now that I am the primary user I am just sick of it. Boot up from off to a responsive usable machine is 2.5 minutes. Shut down from a blank screen is ~40 seconds, which isn't too bad. Loading programs like quicken and keepass seems to take forever. I recently installed windows 10 which actually seemed to help the overall responsiveness. but not enough for me.

It isn't a cutting edge machine and wasn't when we bought it, I always assumed it was memory or the processor. Then i installed W10 and found that the HDD is always at 100% in task manager when it is being sluggish. Memory is rarely over 45% usage and the processor is hardly ever fully utilized.

Crystal Mark (100MB) read / write
Seq Q32T1: 61.86 / 54.27
4K Q32T1: 0.87 / 1.219
Seq: 58.51 / 56.62
4k: 0.349 / 0.996

From my personal experience an SDD is one of the best upgrades that can be made to any computer but is it worth putting a sdd in this thing? For what i am using it for a 120gb would be fine and could be bought for $60.

OR

Would i be better off trying a fresh install of W10 w/o all of the Toshiba bloatware?


Specs
Processor: I3 2319M 2.1 GHz
Ram: 4 gb
HDD: Toshiba MK6475GSX 640 gb
OS: Win 10 Home
 
Thanks Earthdodg that is kind of where it was at but not completely sure. Do you think i will still get an appreciable improvement even on an older i3?
 
Have you chkdsk'd the drive? Toshiba drives are the worst and it could be failing. Regardless a SSD should make it faster than new.
 
Toshiba had a hdd utility that said it was "good" but I did not check the individual values
 
HDSentinel is a great HDD diagnostic and health monitor app. The trial should give you some insight on your drive if you are curious.
 
The bottom line is that a 5400 RPM on an upgraded OS with possible bloatware simply isn't going to give good performance by today's standards. This disk is large enough to have good areal density and hence some degree of sequential reads, but with a combined disk access time of at least 17ms due to seek and average rotational latency, real world performance as anything other than a data drive doesn't cut it. It's slow enough that most people around here wouldn't use it in anything other than a USB enclosure.
 
Storage is getting nicely inexpensive these days.
Saw a 7200rpm 500gb 32mb cache Sata 6gbps laptop drive on newegg for 56.99

Quick question, why do they classify them as Laptop drives, not just small form factor?
I've used 2.5" drives in desktops for years.
 
my daughter has a toshiba L775 that I put an ssd in. a world of difference that makes, you will be suprised
 
Storage is getting nicely inexpensive these days.
Saw a 7200rpm 500gb 32mb cache Sata 6gbps laptop drive on newegg for 56.99

Quick question, why do they classify them as Laptop drives, not just small form factor?
I've used 2.5" drives in desktops for years.

Just due to the original usage. Most people still think of the original use. They are widely used in just about everything today.
 
Just got it up and running with my shinny new SSD. I went with a Kingston V300 120GB, I have had a v100 in my gaming computer as primary boot for well over a year and it was working well. Certainly not the fastest drive but bang for the buck it seems to work.

Anyway after a bunch of Id10t errors installing W10 (didn't verify the dvd after it I burned it) the laptop is up and running. My 2.5 to 2.75 minute boot ritual was reduced to an astonishing 33 seconds with fast boot OFF. And this from a laptop i was considering replacing due to the [lack of] speed. Everything is just that much quicker from opening keepass to browsing the net.

I said it when I purchased my first SSD, and my second, and now my third if your are on the fence about using a SSD it is (IMO) the best bang for the buck as far as computer upgrades go. (as long as you aren't using it to backup important files ;) )

Thanks guys!
 
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