Buying A New Laptop
 | Author:
Victor Sample
Vic Sample: MT43 News Treasurer |
Buying A New Laptop Victor Sample I have several times discussed disk drives for computers and the difference between SSD and HDD. SSD is a solid state disk drive (an electronic disk drive) with no mechanical, moving parts. An HDD (hard disk drive) is the conventional, mechanical disk drive that has been used in personal computers since they first appeared.
The mechanical drives are very slow (relative to computer speed) and have moving parts. They are constantly spinning and have a “head” that moves across the spinning disk. Eventually all HDD drives will fail – quite often with a “head crash” where the head wears out and falls into the spinning disk.
Solid State Drives (SSDs) are relatively new. They are much faster and since they have no moving parts, should last a much longer time; although even solid state electronics do wear out and fail.
It is becoming harder and harder to find new computers that still use HDD disk drives. Most of the new computers are built using SSD. The problem is that, at this time, SSD drives are much more expensive; to keep the cost down the SSD drives usually have a smaller capacity. It is common to see 1 Terrabyte (1000 Gigabyte) HHD drives. Most newer computers ship with 256 or 512 GB SSD drives.
One of the signs of a failing HDD drive is that your computer can become very slow. The operating system will “quarantine” bad sectors on the drive and it starts to slow down as the number of sectors failing increases.
The laptop I have been using for the last 2 years was showing signs of the HDD failing. I started using this laptop because the laptop I used for many years had an HDD fail. So, I knew it was time to get a new laptop – I just kept putting off spending the money (and time configuring a new laptop). Then one day as I was trying to join a ZOOM meeting, my HDD drive failed.
So, I had to buy a new computer. I researched a number of computers and found one that met my specifications: 16GB (gigabytes of memory) and a 1TB (terabyte) SSD drive. It was fairly expensive but within the price I was willing to pay.
I am VERY happy with the new laptop. My old laptop would take anywhere from 10 – 30 minutes to fully boot up. Just starting the Edge browser was a 5 minute task. Part of that was because the HDD was failing and partly because it only had 8GB of memory along with the HDD.
The new laptop with 16GB memory and a 1TB SSD is extremely fast. I can fully boot up in less than 1 minute. Edge is fully up and running right after I double click on the icon. The web server I run on my laptop for testing purposes runs as fast as web servers on commercial sites on the internet.
All in all, paying a little extra for the SSD was well worth it for me. I am a very heavy user of the computer and the time saving is tremendous.
Another key factor in how fast the computer runs is the amount of memory. The more applications you have running (a web browser, a word processor, QuickBooks or a spreadsheet, listening to music (especially streaming) all use up your memory. When the memory usage is high, the Operating System needs to do a lot of paging (heavy use on your disk drive). The combination of SSD and 16GB of memory makes my laptop extremely fast.
If you consider buying a new laptop – consider getting one with an SSD drive – they are worth it. But make sure that it is big enough to hold all the data on your old HDD drive.
