Recycling an old PC with a SSD

My old PC is from 2005, and features an AMD Athlon 3500+, 2gb RAM, a WD 7200rpm 250gb hard-drive, and all that on a Gigabyte K8NMF-9 (nVidia chipset) motherboard. Windows XP was on it, and it took around 5 minutes to start-up and shut-down. Furthermore, programs like Picasa took forever to perform simple such operations as adding a face in a picture! Although I defragmented quite often, that did not help.

A clear bottleneck was the harddrive. 7200rpm is not bad, but it was simply old/inefficient/noisy. My thoughts went to replacing that HD with a Solid-State-Drive. Basically, a SSD is a hard drive without mechanical parts. The memory used is based on memory chips (non-volatile, unlike RAM, meaning that they need no power to keep the information). All-in-all, it means less latency, and lower access time, in short: a faster PC!

After reading through various tests and reviews (ie.: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssd-price-per-gb-ssd-performance,2942.html), I decided to go for the Crucial M4 64Gb SSD. It has SATA3 support, although I do not need it, but that could prove convenient in the future. I ordered it for around 95€, shipping inclusive, from “www.hardwareversand.de”. I also ordered “mounting brackets” so I could fit the 2,5″ drive into a 3,5″ slot (2,5″ is the standard for Laptops, not desktops) for 4€. 2 workdays later, I got all of it at home.

Before I could plug the SSD in, I had to check for a SATA cable, as the drive ships with… nothing. I was lucky and found a unused cable from another PC. The power-supply plug is not standard either (remember: it is meant to be setup in a laptop). But I was lucky and found one unused adapter too. Just keep it in mind if you order an SSD though.
The hardware installation went perfectly well. Plugin the SATA in SATA, and the power supply in an empty power-supply plug.

Since I had XP installed on the old computer, I needed to install an Operating System supporting TRIM too. I had the choice between Ubuntu (Linux, free) or Windows 7 (80€) which both support TRIM. TRIM-support basically means that the performance of your SSD does not decrease after a while. More information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM
I choose Windows 7 since I needed at least a system where I can install mainstream software like Tax Software, Games, etc….

To install Windows, after plugging in the SSD, I restarted the PC and entered the BIOS by hitting “Del”/”Entf” during the PC start. Ther I could change the boot order to CD (where the Win7 Install CD was located). Automatically, the PC picked the installer up and started the installation of Win7. During the installation, I could chose to install Win7 on the SSD, which I did. WOrked great!

The installation took around 10 minutes, and was pretty straight-forward in comparison to other Windows versions. Once finished, I restarted the PC completely. At that point, I was already surprised, as it took only 40 seconds (from “push-the-button” to “I can work”) for Windows to start! With XP, it took at least 3 minutes before I could work. Next steps were to install graphics (ATI x800) and sound (realtek chipset audio) drivers.

Once the installation finished, I still had my old harddrive accessible, including the old Windows XP install, so I did not need to make any specific backup (which I still did, just in case).

All programs now start pretty quickly now, the PC feels much snappier and responsive, making it much more pleasant to use! Cool! On the downside, I have to be carefull in regards to the HD space usage, but that should be fine since more and more features just lie in… the cloud.

Conclusion is that it was pretty easy to install a new SSD on an old PC, giving him a second life for little money! For more detailed infos or tips, just ping me!