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I have a family member who complains that her laptop is slow. I checked the laptop over and indeed, it was slow, so I looked into what was using the most hardware, and found that the hard drive was at 100% pretty much the whole time.
I disabled as many services and programs at startup as I could (without disabling the Trend Micro Internet Security suite), but the HDD was still at 100%. So I advised her to purchase an SSD (a Samsung 128GB, just released).
She received the drive in the post today, and she wants me to 'do my magic'.
The storage space taken up is 79GB, which is fine as she doesn't use the SSD for massive files/folders (only to browse the 'net, read emails, type up Word docs, etc). The source drive has a 260GB capacity, with an extra 60GB for the laptop's recovery partition (I don't plan to transfer this partition across).
The backup/restore utility is the standard Windows 7 backup/restore utility, though I may consider using Acronis..
I have two questions that I would like to know before I commence:
Can a system image from a larger drive be restored to a smaller one, especially since the source drive is a HDD and the target is an SSD?
Is a HDD to SSD transfer possible?
Would it just be wiser to install Windows onto the SSD, and then transfer the programs, documents, and settings of the old HDD?
I've seen this question about restoring a Windows system image to a smaller drive, but it doesn't really answer my questions.
13If the harddisk is at 100% constantly, chances are that the system is swapping heavily. Replacing the harddisk with an SSD will only fix the symptom, but it may be a good idea to extend the RAM and fix the real issue (which will also enhance the lifetime of the SSD as well as reduce power consumption). – Simon Richter – 2014-05-07T16:14:08.570
However, 100% usage can repeat even after moving to SSD. If it repeats look here and here
– Jet – 2014-05-07T17:21:18.767Yeah- I'm extending the RAM to 6GB also. – AStopher – 2014-05-07T18:06:14.987
Did you try disabling the 'swap' memory on the OS? That could reduce the HDD access time. – shortstheory – 2014-05-08T04:09:43.217
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I'd go for a clean install. This way you can also filter out any unnecessary programs during the reinstallation. To reinstall the programs, you might want to check out Ninite.
– BlueCacti – 2014-05-08T07:08:37.2472@shortstheory: disabling swap is a really, REALLY bad idea, both for performance and reliability. – Michael Borgwardt – 2014-05-08T08:04:40.470
2From Vista onward, swapping is only used if the memory is really full. So disabling swap does not help with performance, except that your computer crashes instead of becoming slow. – Alexander – 2014-05-08T10:44:24.717
I've also found that the average memory usage is around 1.26GB/4GB – AStopher – 2014-05-08T12:18:22.247
@MichaelBorgwardt: Perhaps, but it happens to work for me. I have 4 GB of RAM and I find my laptops works much better with 'swapiness' set to 10% instead of the default 60%. I would like to get rid of swap altogether, but I don't have enough RAM to do so :( – shortstheory – 2014-05-09T07:53:28.983