Post subject: Extending the life of an old War Horse Posted: Nov 28, 2009 - 08:57 PST
Joined: Nov 28, 2009
Posts: 1
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I have an old Dell PC 733mhz CPU that I have been very happy with for 8 years.
Three years ago I got into Photoshop processing, bit torrent downloads, and Firefox is always sucking up more memory.
Anyway, the old war horse takes a long time to boot(2min) and with all those other applications running there is quite a bit of HD swapping going on especially when moving from application to application.
Since my onboard mem modules are maxed out I was wondering if a SSD would help the situation any.
Theoretically a SSD drive should make a big impact booting up. Then when the system is swapping away this would be done in to and from the SSD which should speed things quite a bit as well.
My existing HD is an IDE but I know I can buy a IDE to SATA2 converter socket. The converter is actually has a little circuit board that does stuff before the electrons run out the SATA sockets.
I know the IDE bus would not be as quick as a SATA bus but doing away with the mechanical HD should be very noticeable… at least I would think it would.
My question is, if I can get a SATA2 drive at a good price would I be dong away with the bottlenecks as much as I think I would???
I saw a 32GB Imation drive already for $156. I figure after the life of this computer is over I can still use the drive for other things.
Thoughts?
SSDRocks
Post subject: RE: Extending the life of an old War Horse Posted: Dec 29, 2009 - 01:42 PST
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Joined: Apr 18, 2005
Posts: 36
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I think for $156 + the cost of the IDE to SATA adapter you should put towards a new budget PC (which you can get for about $300 without monitor) instead for much better overall performance. At 733 MHz your CPU and likely the lack of RAM would be the main bottlenecks.
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