If you or your staff regularly work on multiple applications, work with resource hungry software or constantly get complaints that their machines don’t perform as well as they would expect – then maybe it’s time to think about upgrading your machines. Increasing the memory (RAM) is the first and cheapest port of call, however if that does not do the trick you should take a look and see what type of hard disk is installed on the slow machines.
Most PCs often come installed with standard hard disks. These are spinning drives that use a mechanical arm with a read / write head to move around and read information. These disks have come on leaps and bounds over the years, however their mechanical nature limits their overall performance. Hard drive manufacturers work hard to improve data transfer speeds and reduce latency and idle time, but there’s only so much they can do – for example your machine takes longer to start up over time.
There is a high speed alternative: A Solid State Drive (SSD)
‘Solid State’ is industry term for a hard drive with an integrated circuit to store data, and that’s the key difference between an SSD and a HHD: there are no moving parts inside an SSD. Rather than using disks, motors and read/write heads, SSDs use flash memory instead. SSDs provide a huge performance advantage over standard hard drives – they’re faster to start up, faster to shut down, and faster to transfer data. SSDs are very reliable and durable hard drives able to withstand knocks and shocks which makes them ideal for using in laptops. They use less power than HHDs do, don’t make noise. As a result, computers designed to use SSDs can be smaller, thinner, lighter and last much longer on a single battery charge than computers that use standard hard drives.
From a cost point of view, a machine’s hard disk can be upgraded at a hardware cost of less than £100. Once installed the speed difference will make you think you’ve got a new PC – but at a fraction of the cost. There are obviously instances where a new machine is needed, however as long as the device isn’t too old a RAM and SSD upgrade is always recommended – but we always recommend testing one computer upgrade before deciding to roll out this approach for many machines within your business.