Windows gone into snail mode?

[Jussi Halonen]

There was a solution for me, maybe there is one for you.

 

[MrJamie]

You could look at cloud type storage too, for backing things up

I have a similar setup as RussellZero, with a 250gb SSD for operating system, applications, games and an old style hard disk for data/storage. Important documents, files and photos etc get copied to both disks incase one dies. Running Windows from a SSD has been the biggest single performance upgrade I've seen in a while, it's just so much faster in loading things, from power on to Windows desktop in about 10 seconds. Hopefully reliability doesn't let it down though

 

[ColinJ]

Your neice was dropping her pc a few feet or throwing for that matter. Ipods don't keel over if you go jogging with them (the older harddrive based variety)

Good point!

I haven't looked inside the laptop, but I imagine that there isn't room for 2 drives so it would be either SSD or HDD but not both. I'll stick with things as they are now until I have a bit more cash then try an SSD inside and the HDD for external backup.

The laptop is still working well, apart from some audio distortion which I haven't managed to fix. The sound is a lot better than it was when my HDD was in PIO mode, but something still isn't quite right. Dell don't seem to have any more recent drivers available and I don't want to spend too much time messing about, so I'll leave it alone for now.

You could look at cloud type storage too, for backing things up

I think I'd rather take care of it locally, but I must start storing a second backup somewhere else in case my house burns down or I get burgled!

 

[sheddy]

BM

 

[ColinJ]

ZQ

 

[Doseone]

My laptop died on me a week ago. Completely froze up, had to do a manual shutdown then just wouldn't boot not even to safemode. I ran all the diagnostics I could, disc chk etc and nothing. I had created a system restore point the day before but it wouldn't let me use it On the list of restore points the evening before the laptop froze there had been a windows update. I am very suspicious.

Anyway, outcome is my mate who is a genius with this sort of stuff is fitting a new hard drive.

 

[Garz]

Incidentally, I checked the price of 60 GB SSDs and they are now as cheap as the Toshiba HDD that I currently use. I'm thinking of buying an SSD plus a USB drive enclosure such as this one and using the HDD in that to back up the SSD.

I bought one around September last year as it dropped below the £70 mark (for a 120Gb) and it has proven to be a great improvement Colin. I still plug in my old drive and boot from that to retrieve the odd file I forgot to copy and when I do it makes me cringe how slow they are when compared to one another.

 

[ColinJ]

I bought one around September last year as it dropped below the £70 mark (for a 120Gb) and it has proven to be a great improvement Colin. I still plug in my old drive and boot from that to retrieve the odd file I forgot to copy and when I do it makes me cringe how slow they are when compared to one another.

Sounds good!

I am currently only using half of my 60 GB drive and money is tight so I'll stick with a smaller SSD when I finally get round to buying one, unless the higher capacity ones have fallen to £40-odd by then.

I know I really shouldn't say this (for fear of jinxing myself), but my laptop has been behaving perfectly since I fixed the problem with the bad block on the HDD!

 

[Garz]

Touch spinny-magnetic disc (instead of wood)!

 

[ColinJ]

It's still working fine!

I'm pretty certain now that problems with the bad block containing the Java cacerts file caused the laptop to go into snail mode. If it wasn't that, then it's funny that sorting the bad block out coincided with a miraculous spontaneous recovery!

 

[ColinJ]

I think that I can declare it fixed!

 

[ColinJ]

And it is still working perfectly over 7 months later!