I'm trying to decide if I should upgrade my laptop's RAM and maybe HDD ... This laptop is still pretty good as far as I'm aware, but I'm finding 4GB is starting to feel a bit tight so I was thinking of upgrading to 8. And since I hear SSDs are starting to become better priced and they are so super awesome or whatever, and for really no other reason, I've thought to look in to them too.

So basically what I'm asking here is for help deciding if the expense is worth the upgrades and, if I do decide to proceed, help making sure I don't stupidly buy something that is entirely the wrong part, will break as soon as I open the box, or somehow melt my machine. I don't really have a set budget for it.. I'm going by economical is best, unless there is some great benefit to something more pricey. I'm not sure if SSDs are too expensive, but I'm also not really sure if I'm looking at the right ones.


Below is my trying to figure out which cryptic identifiers most closely resemble what is already in my machine. xD


I opened up the access panels on the bottom and wrote down the RAM numbers, "RMT3020EF48E8W-1333", which googling told me I had "RAMAXEL 2GB DDR3 PC3-10600S-999 SODIMM MEMORY MODULE RMT3020EF48E8W-1333". Knowing absolutely nothing about what most of that means and just matching up filter options with things I see and pretty much clicking the first results, I found this or this. I know nothing of brands or anything, so I have no idea what else to look for or if either of these are suitable (my friend said he's seen people talking about gskill so recommended that, probably just because he's heard of it).

Also I think this tiny and mysterious empty slot might be related to an SSD slot, since the laptop specs I found (which don't seem to be very technical or specific) say it can come with one:

Except I'm not sure what that little wire is for...

If it is, I have no idea what size or kind fits in it. xD I'm only familiar with 3.5" and 2.5"-sized drives, and not like matchbook-sized ones (newegg search filter options do show such tiny sizes ..).
If it's not, I took a picture of my harddrive's label and see that it is "SATA 3.0Gb/s" which ... I'm lost at. Looking it up on wikipedia, is that SATA II? I'm starting to think I should have taken a picture of the connector... xD


If anyone feels like providing input or helping to guide me, it would be much appreciated. I know next to nothing when it comes to hardware stuff... xD

EDIT:
Googling shows there is a different slot that the SSD goes in to. It says it's an mSATA slot, and I don't know what that is.
EDIT2:
This is the slot:

I guess it's not really the best picture with it straight down over it, but it's the only way the flash didn't completely wash out the image (and no flash is too dark to see).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226362 ?

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on May 15 2015, 7:06 am by FaRTy1billion.

Get a SSD. No question here. There's no other part that gives you a speed boost of that magnitude and at around the $100 mark that's more than worth it. Your CPU is already good, so coupled with the RAM upgrade you'll feel a hefty speed boost when starting applications and of course improved general responsiveness.
The mSATA slot you have is especially good news because it means what only few laptop owners can say: Fast system drive AND large storage drive because you don't have to remove your old hdd.
My recommendation would be with this drive: http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-850-mSATA-2-Inch-MZ-M5E250BW/dp/B00TGIVTP2/
250GB for future proof-ness and more options of having large programs or games on the fast SSD, but you could also go with the 120GB variant which will be fine for a few years if you're on a tight budget.

The RAM modules you picked are both fine. There's really not much to care for except speed and DDR revision: DDR3, 1333 MHz in your case.

The mysterious slot is most likely a PCIe slot for extension cards. Not sure if the mentioned AMD graphics are already onboard but if not they'd go there if you decide you need gaming power. Another possibility would be propriety slot for added features like UMTS module, but I doubt it. Don't mind the wires.

Thanks!

Thanks for the recommendation! I'm not really on a budget, as I said, it's just if I want to spend all my money at once or not. xD So I guess I'll just see how much space all my actual programs and stuff are and decide from there how much I want to spend ...

Good to hear. I figured RAM is RAM, but like I said I don't know much about these things (it's been a really long time since I ever learned about it, and stuff changes so fast). xD

Yeah, that's a PCIe slot. It being an expansion slot makes sense, and makes sense why the spare antenna wire would go in there. I think the graphics are onboard, since when I open the RAM/CPU slot there are two chips there I assumed one was the GPU.


Thanks again. I'll order these later today or tomorrow so long as nobody says something different.

Since I saw you contemplating about 120/250GB SSD + 500/1000GB HDD in the shoutbox I feel I should elaborate on my reasoning for recommending the 250GB variant to you:

As far as space consumption goes you want at least
- 40 GB for Windows *1
- 12 GB for swap file *2
- 8 GB for hibernation file *3
- 5-10 GB for temp files *4
- 10-20 GB for programs
- 10% reserve
= 85-100 GB for your system + programs.
Considering 120GB are only 111GB (actually gibibyte, or GiB) in Windows you'll realize that you have only 11-26GB to work with for games and other stuff.

This sounds pretty tight, but it's actually manageable: Games do not benefit from the SSD as much as you might think. Loading times are sped up only by about 10-20% for larger games, so it's not too bad to put the bulk of the games on the HDD. That way even a 120GB SSD can have enough breathing room, but you gotta be pretty specific where you put your stuff and will always feel pressured not to waste SSD space. It requires some discipline but it's definitely doable.

Now it's your decision if you want to save money now and train yourself in a "proper usage protocol" or put in a few extra bucks for a few years of carefreeness. Knowing you, I think you made the right decision by ordering the 250GB variant.

*1: My current Windows 7 folder on an 4-5 year old installation is just below 25GB. This will tend to go up with more updates / service packs and possibly new OS versions, so I'll take a conservative estimate of 40GB (while I think it will actually max out somewhere just above 30GB) because we're planning several years into the future here.

*2 Recommended swap file size is ~1.5x RAM.

*3 I deactivated hibernation on my desktop PC (and thus saving 8GB on my SSD) because I use deep stand-by: Everything is shut off except RAM which allows instantly restoring the desktop state. But this constantly requires a small amount of energy to the RAM which is fine even for laptops when you pause for a few hours. But it will suck your battery dry if you leave it in this state for a day or a few, so you use the "slow stand-by" called hibernation which doesn't need battery because everything will be saved to your SSD.

*4 When you extract large archives you want to use your fast SSD for caching + plus a ton of other stuff

Oh, right. I always forget that the loading time is transferring the data to the video memory, not necessarily loading it from the hard drive.

Eh, 120 may have been better overall ... but oh well. This gives lots of space for expansion (which I believe was part of your original reasoning for recommending it).

Is swapfile / hibernation bad for the SSD? I know right now swapfile (due to lower RAM that I'm using) is why my computer has been a bit sluggish lately (as stuff is constantly transferred around the swapfile) ... but I'm more worried about excessive wear. ;o

You only need a swap file if you don't have enough RAM. I suspect that with 8gb of RAM, windows probably never uses the swap file (unless you're actually filling all that RAM up, like doing video editing etc). Of course you've only got 2GB of RAM in your laptop so the swap file probably is used.

As for wear longevity of an SSD: ideally you wouldn't have a swap file, or any other 'highly changing' data on the drive, as it will incur extra write cycles. But the wear on SSDs really is very forgiving: it's on the order of writing the entire contents of the drive every day for 3 years before you'll have a failure according to the manufacturer warranty. Testing has shown that in practice the drives can last an extra 50-100% longer than this.

So in short, you don't really need to worry about write longevity of modern SSDs, unless you're doing something particularly weird or server-load-like. What is more likely to kill your SSD is a fault in some other part of the device (controller for example), or simply buggy firmware that corrupts or loses data.

Yeah, wear is not gonna be a problem. This was an argument for offloading the swap file in the early times of SSDs, but number of write cycles has dramatically increased since then, so you want your "extra RAM" to be fast.

While Lanth is correct in theory about not needing a swap file, in practice some programs expect it to be there to cache data to it and will act strangely if it's not there. So you should at least have a small amount of SSD space dedicated as virtual memory at all times. If you really need the recommended 12 GB is up for debate; my guts say 8GB RAM + 4GB swap should be fine.

Last gen's 250GB 840 EVO went through over 700TiB of writes before it needed to start reallocating sectors, and it went nearly another 200TiB before the drive died entirely. Even if you're writing 60GB (six times the average for a heavy user) to the SSD on a daily basis (pray tell why you're constantly writing 25% of the drive's capacity), this will outlast all other hardware components, including the average lifespan of HDDs.

Write cycles are the least of your concerns these days.

Ok, that's all I needed to hear.

As you can tell I am indeed very outdated in my hardware knowledge (which is why it's easier to just assume I know nothing.) xD



Thanks everyone! I'm excited for them to arrive so I can reformat and then experience an SSD for the first time!

the only reason for a swap file anymore is to store a crash dump. For that you only need 1.1x your RAM size.

Most people don't run out of RAM anymore.

Speak for yourself Rockz.

On the automatic page file setting it says 8 gb allocated, 12 recommended.. Should I leave it at that or set it to a hard amount?
or should I set it to initial 4gb Max like 8 or 12?

This is a question almost as old as Windows itself and has never been conclusively answered, as you should've noticed by the answers in this thread.

That being said personally, I stopped bothering and just kept it on automatic. And since you got the 250gb variant you probably won't need the extra space so could as well enjoy the carefreeness of the automatic setting.
Just 1 thing: Set your HDD to no page file.

You really should ask these things in the topic Farty...


http://snag.gy/XeLtc.jpg



I have other folders for my collections that are easier to access and back up. So what I have there is either temporary or I was too lazy to move it yet. If you have 5+ GB (this number may vary) in those folders move them.



Because Windows uses NTFS file system which features a user based access policy. Users from your old computer (including those that originally wrote the data there) are not known to your new computer. Just using the same account name is not enough btw.
Since you're not the owner of these files you are denied access. So what you need to do is go file properties > security tab > advanced and set the owner to your main user and then give your main user full access. There's a checkbox somewhere to tell it to do on all subfolders and files too. Usually the first time you're trying to access these files Windows prompts you to do that so you'd only have to click OK.



The drive doesn't matter, what's important is the file system, which you choose when formatting. Most likely NTFS. I explained above how it works.
For external drives that are accessed from different new computers regularly it might be worth it to allow write access to the user "everyone"



Bad idea. Since Win7 UAC is pretty sensible and invaluable for security. Don't disable. Fix the reason you're getting a prompt instead.



yes

Most things aren't necessary here.

I was mostly complaining because it kept coming up. I tried the 'apply to all subfolders' but because it was my backups and thousands of folders it was taking forever so I cancelled it.



Because I'm trying to install/run programs/do literally anything ever? I didn't turn it off anyway; I just turned it down mostly so it wouldn't grey out the entire screen.



Thanks. i was mostly asking Moose because I thought he would know.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on May 24 2015, 3:25 pm by FaRTy1billion.

cancelling permissions on a folder move is a good way for the files to become corrupted.

Also, UAC was poorly designed.

Not a move. Changing privileges so it'd stop asking me.