Good news for  you!!!  And did you make that wall?    

Thank you tbc and yes, I made the wall. Like it?

You got me thinking about my Toshiba laptop. I might change out the hd for a SSD. Right now it has a 750gb and 16gigs of ram. The boot up time takes so long. I'm dreading installing it I have to take the whole bottom off. I know the HP's have a little door. I have 2 HP's sitting here and I've changed out the hd's in them.

Good for you Ross!

I replaced every single HDD in all my PC's with SSD's, I will never use anything else.

I just replaced the hd in my desktop with a SSD. The difference is night and day. 

When finances permit I may replace it with an SSD but for now I'm a happy camper lol.

LightStar

reply 7

I replaced every single HDD in all my PC's with SSD's, I will never use anything else.

Same here, all my machines have SSDs installed for the OS and programs, etc.  However, I still use HDDs for storage.  Those are usually external drives, though, and are only turned on as required to save getting slower boot times.  Yes, even with an SSD hosting the OS, boot times can be significantly slower if the machine has several active HDDS connected.  That's why all my additional drives are inactive until I need them.

Hey Ross, good to see your machine is bach up and running, that you didn't lose all your data.

I have just one external drive. One TB divided into three partitions. One for backups, one for storage and one for stuff.

First option for upgrading any Laptop is more ram.

Second option is to dump platter drives for SSD.

Doing both will prolong the usable life of an older Laptop....and result in significantly less finger-tapping waiting for 'stuff' to happen...

The first thing I did was upgrade the ram to 16 gigs. That was before the drive failed. I did only what I could afford at the time. I know SSD's are better, faster and more user friendly (as long as you don't try to defrag it lol). I've checked out a few and saw they range from $37.00 up to $150.00 US. I'll see what I got left next month after my bills get paid. If I can I will, if not I can wait. But this is why I wanted a better machine. I love my Photoshop and I want to be able to take advantage of its 3D capabilities and learn how to animate my creations. What can I say...I like my toys.   

Latest maxing out of my machine.....32bit proggy so bit of a pain...

9 instances of PSP 6, 3 of DxtBMP, and FSX itself .... just one image alone has 52 layers at 4096 x 4096.

Probably would be a darn expensive laptop to manage all that...

OS, Graphics proggies and FSX are all on a M.2 'drive' [think SSD on steroids]...

To say the least. If I ever went that way it wouldn't be on a laptop. I've seen them go for four grand. Ouch!

I have a few more externals than that to store photos and videos from various family members, not to mention my music library, the OS drive and other backups, plus the skins I have collected over the years.  However, to prevent slow boots, etc, mine are all inactive until required.

Jafo

reply 14

First option for upgrading any Laptop is more ram.

Second option is to dump platter drives for SSD.

Doing both will prolong the usable life of an older Laptop....and result in significantly less finger-tapping waiting for 'stuff' to happen...

That's fine if the laptop accepts more RAM.  Shaunna's first laptop, a Compaq, didn't.  It came with 4 Gb and that's all it would take.  I tried inserting a stick of 8Gb of the same value, but the machine wouldn't boot until I put back the 4Gb stick.  As for the SSD, well they weren't an option back then, and now she has an ASUS laptop that's quite zippy with 8Gb of RAM and a 120Gb SSD.

Depends on which type of M.2 you have: SATA; PCIe or NVME.... the NVME being the fastest as it uses more PCIe lanes and has higher read and write speeds.