Maintenance
SSD upgrade for a laptop: the cheapest speed you can buy
Nothing else you can change makes an old laptop feel new in quite the same way.
An SSD upgrade laptop owners keep putting off is usually the single best thing they could do to a machine they already own. If yours still has a mechanical hard disk, this is where the slowness lives.
How to tell what you have
Open Task Manager, go to the Performance tab, and look at the disk entry. Windows labels it either HDD or SSD.
Alternatively, listen. A mechanical drive makes a soft whirr and a faint click when it works. An SSD is silent, because there is nothing inside it that moves.
Why it changes so much
A mechanical drive physically moves a head to find data. Everything else in the machine waits while that happens, which is why a laptop can feel slow even with plenty of memory.
Consequently the difference shows in exactly the moments that annoy people. Boot time, opening a browser, waking from sleep, switching between applications. Those all shorten dramatically.
When an SSD upgrade will not fix it
If your machine already has an SSD and still crawls, look elsewhere. Heat is the usual culprit, and a throttling processor produces exactly the same feeling of slowness.
Our guide on laptop overheating covers that. Failing storage can also mimic it, which is described in hard drive failure signs.
Do you lose your files?
No. We clone the existing drive to the new one, so Windows, your programs and your files all arrive intact. You switch on afterwards and everything is where you left it, only faster.
Even so, back up first. Our laptop data backup guide takes one evening and is worth doing before any repair.
Choosing the right one
Laptops take different formats. Older machines use a 2.5 inch SATA drive, while newer ones use an M.2 stick, and not every M.2 slot accepts every M.2 drive.
We check the slot type before ordering. On Lenovo machines we fit genuine parts where they exist, as explained on our authorised service page.