New lease of life

I have an old Dell PC.  It was at the high end of the range when I bought it, but it's a bit old now.   It used to be my main desktop PC running Windows 7, but the Ethernet connection got fried in a thunderstorm, so I relegated it to use as a driver for my music system.  It holds my MP3s and connects to Spotify and other web-based music sources (via WiFi).

I have generally been impressed with the PC itself.  It seems solidly built, and it's maintainable: you can replace the battery easily enough, and can access the disk drives and memory chips by unscrewing a single screw.  What's more, Dell's tech support is excellent.  Their website identifies your PC, tells you what drivers you need and helps with fault diagnosis.  You can quickly get a Dell techie online too, if you get stuck.

It was getting a bit slow, and I was wondering what to do about that.  I was in the habit of keeping it running (in sleep mode) when not in use because it took so long to boot, and then the applications were slow to start.   When I want to listen to music, I prefer not to have to wait 5 minutes.

There were options for improving things;  replace it with a new one (expensive), or perhaps upgrade the memory.  Installing Ubuntu Linux was a possibility, it's supposed to make PCs go faster.  I have heard good things about solid state disk drives (SSDs) too, perhaps I can upgrade it with one of those. 

In the olden days of computers you had two types of memory: fast (and therefore expensive) main memory, and slower (and hence cheaper) bulk storage.  The former was originally in the form of tiny magnetic rings and is more recently on memory chips, the latter was and still is to a large extent, disk drives.  Advances in memory technology have meant that you can economically use the fast memory chips for bulk storage, hence SSDs.  (Solid state is an ancient term, used to differentiate transistors and microchips (solid state) from thermionic valves (gaseous state)).

Given that I like the build quality and tech support, I decided to upgrade it rather than replace it, and decided to invest a relatively small mount of dosh in an SSD. 

YouTube is a wonderful thing - if you are trying to do something a bit complicated, there is always someone who has done it before, and has posted a video of how to do it.  I fitted the SSD no trouble, installed the Win7, the antivirus, the drivers, and all the software I need (in that order).   It now goes like a rocket.  It takes less than a minute to boot so I switch it off between listening sessions.  Applications load instantly.  I'm a happy bunny.

I did have a problem with Windows 7: I installed the operating system from the disk originally supplied so long ago by Dell.  There have of course, been a couple of hundred upgrades and bug fixes since then, so the PC downloaded them all and then spent an age installing them when I shut it down, and then spent an age failing to configure them and having to roll back, when I restarted it.  I had to do a re-install, and told it to ask permission before it messed around with updates.

The disk comes with a free copy of Acronis disk copying software, the idea being that you can make an exact copy of your old disk then plug in the new SSD in its place.  This didn't work for me either, - the copy failed, but I think it's because I connected it into a slow USB port.  In any case I just formatted the disk and did a cold install instead.

Second-hand Dells are suddenly an attractive proposition, too.