My computer is six years old and its tiny 150GB hard drive was maxed out. So I finally pulled the trigger and decided to upgrade to a 500GB Solid State Drive (SSD). For those of you who do not know, a solid state drive is like an over grown USB thumb drive but it goes inside your computer where your old hard drive use to be. It does not have any moving parts or spinning disks so its ability to read and write information is infinitely faster. Well maybe be not infinitely faster, but 3x to 5x faster. Not bad for $185 in parts.

The upgrade took about 3.5 hours but only needed about an hour of my attention. The other 2.5 hours were spent on the hard drive cloning process, which did not need my involvement. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the cloning process was and even though I ran into an error during my first attempt, it was quickly remedied. That is the good news. Here is the better news. My computer now runs faster than it did when it was new. It takes less than 10 seconds for it to fully boot. Not just to show the desktop but to finish loading all the background programs as well. Additionally, all my programs load and run much faster. I’ve taken the waiting out of my computer experience.

Now keep in mind, I bought this computer with the best processor available at the time. That is why I was able to get six years out of it before getting frustrated with its performance. So if you have an older computer with an i5 or i7 processor and want to buy some more time, I highly recommend this upgrade.