So I have this older desktop, (I call it my entertainment machine because it does everything except trading) a Lenovo IdeaCentre 300 from 10 years ago. Standard fare at the time. Intel i3-2100, 3.1 Ghz. 8GB ram, Win 7 64 bit. 1 TB spinny disk drive. SATA I interface. Over the years, the thing had been getting slower and slower and slower to boot. It got to the point where it was taking, no lie, ~12ish minutes from power-on boot to final hard-drive thrashing and settle into a stable Win desktop. The drive had no bad sectors, no extraneous programs. I guess the machine just is what it always was. The slow burn to super-long boot times for what reason I cannot fathom. Within the past few days, the 10-YO spinny hard drive started it's dreaded death cycle. You know, where on reboot the drive starts making those clicking noises and everything freezes, or other ungodly sounds. The sounds of a spinny hard drive on it's last legs. So I ran out and grabbed a 1TB SSD drive and cloned the original spinny drive to the new SSD. On the reboot with the new drive, the desktop came up in ~15 SECONDS. FIFTEEN FUCKING SECONDS. Holy shit! I am so bloody done with the spinny drives. SSD for teh win.
Welcome to the modern world! Pro tip for the active trader: don't invest your money in hard disk manufacturers.
if you replaced windows with any major linux distribution you would habve obtained the same result. Even a dual boot solution would have worked like a charm.
Oh Phhhtt! Once I left the IT field, it went all crazy forward without me. I got old, I admit it. Buggers!
Not when the physical hard drive is failing. Not even the mighty Puppy Linux or Ubuntu can survive a hard drive failure. I am not talking software here, but HARDWARE. Hello? Oy!
Your SSD took 15 seconds to load windows? Mine is almost instant. But yeah "spinny" hard drive is only good for spare storage nowadays. Congrats on the new SSD though!! They are awesome!!!
He has an old motherboard, so most likely is the communication speed between the board and the SSD the bottle neck (SATA generation 1).
Of course I failed hard drive is useless in any case. I was meaning that what you described "...the thing had been getting slower and slower and slower to boot", could have been instantly solved by throwing windows out of the window...
You need to choose the right distro. The are dedicated ones for older hardware with viagra-like effects!