No Brainer laptop upgrade: 7200 rpm HD
Are you frustrated
with speed of your its-not-even-one-darn-year-old laptop? You have probably already
spent $150+ putting a gig or two of DDR memory in the 32 bit dinosaur.. I had and
my 2.8GHz Hyperthreaded P4 was still a dog. Did you know most laptops come with 4200
rpm hard disks? Well they do, and 4200 rpm is SLOW, as in S…..L…….O……….W
For about $120
and using Norton Ghost I transformed my laptop in under an hour and it is now very
usable. My hunch is that upgrading to a faster hard disk makes much more difference
than upgrading beyond 512MB. With the faster (read hotter) hard disk you do
run the risk that the laptop could overheat; this el-cheapo Averatec 6100
has been fine, but do be aware of this risk and backup your data first.
Bizarrely
the replacement hard disk looks virtually identical to the old one. It came from the
black area in the bottom right of the above picture.
For
the real geeks out there my AMD A64-2800 desktop has a 10,000 rpm WD raptor hard disk
– the prices on these have finally started to drop and if you are a real developer
I say GO FOR THAT TOO. All real developers use desktops right? You
know, I have said that for years but if necessary I could develop on this Averatec
now.