Once destined for the scrap heap, this aquamarine-turquoise Toshiba Satellite A100 gets a new life thanks to a solid-state drive.
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The computer is almost seven years old. It’s got a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo (T2300) processor and came with a 100 GB 5,400 rpm Hitachi Travelstar hard drive. It received an upgrade to 4 GB of RAM some time ago.
When a more modern and powerful laptop computer took its place three years ago, I wiped its contents, re-installed the OS and turned into a media centre of sorts, permanently hooking it up to the television for various purposes.
It continued in that capacity until last year, when it became unbearably buggy and slow with the various programs and USB devices I use.
It sat in storage ever since … until this weekend, when I dusted it off and replaced the stock HDD with a 120 GB Kingston SSDNow V300 solid-state drive. (No motivation other than availability and price for this choice.)
That operation took pretty much only a few minutes. Just unthread the screw on the panel covering the HDD on the bottom of the computer, snap it out and slide the hard drive away to disconnect it from the SATA interface.
The original hard drive is equipped with two rubber sleeves, no doubt intended to give the stock 9-mm hard drive a snug fit and to provide a little extra shock absorption. I opted to reuse the sleeves because the SSD is actually a 7-mm drive with a 2-mm insert to help retain a 9-mm form factor. I even needed a bit of duct tape to keep the two pieces together — handy when sliding the SSD into the drive bay. Otherwise, you’ll have trouble with how the sleeves slide with the SSD, making it almost impossible to snap the cover back on the computer.
In a bit of a gamble, I purchased a copy of Windows 7 Professional instead of re-installing Windows XP Home Edition, the operating system that came with this machine. I was uncertain how well it would perform on such a old machine.
Let’s just saw I’m blown away by how well the OS is doing.
I presume it was the speed of the SSD that made this the fastest Windows installation I’ve ever seen. It was over in about 10 to 15 minutes or so. (I should have timed it, but oh well.)
The only sticking point was that it didn’t automatically install the appropriate video drivers, giving me a stretched VGA-resolution display. I had to go into the driver settings and force it to go online to look for the appropriate driver, which it found.
Installing basic software was just as fast as installing the OS. I was able to add Chrome and OpenOffice in a matter of minutes.
Even light Internet browsing is fast. For sites like WordPress, Facebook and Flickr, where scrolling to the bottom of the screen invokes the delivery of more content, you almost didn’t even have time to reach the “bottom”, with the updates loading and rendering very quickly.
After fiddling with the power settings a little (mainly reducing display brightness and the maximum processor speed) I went about testing the stock battery, the 4,400 mAH PA3478U-1BAS. On a full charge, I was able to work on it for close to 2 hours 15 minutes. (I was lucky to get two hours out of the original setup.)
I am currently testing my second battery, an aftermarket device with a rated capacity of 8,800 mAH. whose specifications I can’t remember off hand. (I’ll update this when I have the chance to safely pop the battery out and read what’s on the label.) At 50% depletion, the indicator said remaining battery life was 1 hour 43 minutes. Not shabby at all, considering it used to deliver about 3 hours previously.
(It should be noted, the time was spent mainly with light web browsing, word processing and opening a few PDFs. No YouTube or any kind of photo/video editing.)
One final observation: This machine is now very quiet, as you’d expect with SSDs having no moving parts. If it wasn’t for the heat-sink fan whirring away, it would be dead quiet.
So there you have it … a seven-year-old laptop computer now performing better than it did when it was fresh out of the box.
