I made my laptop faster with an SSD upgrade!
Introduction
My laptop was really slow and used to take 2 -3 minutes just to boot. It had a WD 1TB 5400rpm drive and after upgrading to an SSD it made a great difference. My laptop’s boot time decreased drastically from 173 seconds to just 16 seconds.
Required Hardware
- A Phillips screwdriver (preferably magnetic)
- An SSD (I have used a SanDisk 240GB SSD Plus)
- A bootable USB to install your preferred OS
Procedure
Warning: These steps may differ for your laptop and may void your warranty, do it at your own risk.
Start by making a bootable USB for your laptop as you will need to install your operating system once again.
Unscrew the backplate of your laptop, making sure it is turned off and keep the screws somewhere safe.
Start opening the backplate, by inserting a guitar pick being gentle around the corners and looking out for any ribbon cables that might be present. Once it’s off, you might want to unplug your battery, but since we are not doing anything major, we should be good.
Pull the HDD out and unplug the SATA cable and remove the old HDD and its brackets(if any) and place it aside.
Put the brackets (if any) on the SSD which we are going to install. Connect the SATA cable to the SSD and place it back in. Put the backplate together and before screwing it in, make sure that your BIOS is detecting the SSD. Once it is, put the screws back in, and install your operating system through your bootable USB.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed your SSD into your laptop.
Results
With a fresh install of Windows 10, here are the boot times:-
Before: With HDD(5400rpm) – 2 minutes 53 seconds
After: With SSD – 16 seconds
If you face any problems in this, feel free to directly mail me at [email protected]