Revitalizing our PC with an SSD
At work and when developing ‘Whose Turn To Pay?’ I use Apple laptops. At home for email and browsing mostly use my iPad. I store my photos on our PC, a Dell Inspiron from a number of years ago. Every morning my wife uses the PC for email, blogs, the household budget etc. Every once in a while I’ll use the PC and think, how does my wife live with how slow this is and I reboot it, do updates etc.. It very quickly degrades again after taking an age to boot.
Over the past few years I’ve been intending to replace the clunky 7200rpm hard drive with and SSD because I was convinced it was the primary cause of the slowness. I believed this because using Task Manager when it’s slow showed the disk at 100% of performance during basic operations, eg web browsing. With Antivirus software, disk indexing, browser caching and all the ancillary things that happen in the back ground these days, it struggled. I’ll give Microsoft some credit though, boot times are considerably better in Windows 8 and Windows 10, but still painful.
So last week I decided it was time to do it. I’ve been putting it off because I expected a fight. Nothing ever goes smoothly upgrading a PC right? And it’s a dying art, I haven’t done this in a long time, most of my devices are as described above Apple where you have no choice.
Luckily a few years ago I discovered Acronis backup software. It’s incredibly fast — what used to take 8 or 9 hours to backup takes only 3. So my plan of attack was do a fresh clean/full backup of the drive, and restore the system to a new SSD of the same size. Simple right?
Kind of.
I ordered a Samsung SSD and a 2.5 inch mounting kit from Frys.com for $313.
1TB Samsung 860Evo SSD
KWI 2.5'’ to 3.5'’ Kit
Frys have a local delivery service from the store nearby so I tried that. First time I’ve used a local delivery service. I liked it because it gave me c9ntrol on the delivery window which was valuable because it needed a signature. It arrived as expected and so one evening I decided to finally do it.
I started a full backup and had dinner, walked the dog did my usual evening stuff. When the backup completed around 9pm, it was time for surgery! I found the Dell easy to open up and disconnect the primary hard drive and mount the SSD in its place. I didn’t screw everything in, just in case there was an issue and I had to yank it back out. I started the full system restore. Time to wait again, and I have never done this so I wasn’t sure how long it would take. 1.5 hours was the estimate from Acronis, so I went back to watching some TV checking on it every few minutes until I was confident to leave it doing its thing. Because it’s not running under Windows, it has its own faux operating environment which is very unresponsive. Sometimes I wondered if it was locked up, but it seemed to continue. Fell a sleep on the couch.
An hour or so later I checked in to see if it was done, and it said ‘Recovery failed’. No other error. No indication of the cause. Dammit! Acronis, you failed me. A backup system isn’t worth anything if you can’t restore in emergencies.
I returned the primary hard drive back to its place, booted the machine to make sure it was going to work in the morning for my wife and left the parts strewn across the desk for another day, and round two. I was annoyed, but we expected it not to work first time right? I went to bed around 1AM.
The weekend came, round two.
I decided that even though Acronis 2016 was updated and supported Windows 10, perhaps I’d have more luck with the latest version. Another $29.99 later, and a couple of hours downloading, installing and rebooting the PC, I was ready. Again I started a full backup with the new version. Several hours later, it was done and surgery would resume. This time I knew that I could hang the new drive off without removing the primary enclosure so I saved myself a few minutes, you know, just in case it failed again.
Started the recovery, monitored, waited, slept on the couch again. Got up, checked it. ‘Recovery Succeeded’. Awesome. Thanks Acronis, that wasn’t so bad, you redeemed yourself.
So I restarted the PC and sat back to revel in the glory of speed that was about to unfold. The PC refused to boot. Dammit.
I started researching why, considered whether I should have used Acronis Universal Recovery instead of True Image because it is best for ‘dissimilar’ hardware. Is SSD dissimilar? Hmm not sure. I found lots of info on Acronis support site, better than most I’ve seen. Poked around, ended up putting the old drive back in again. It was 2AM this time.
Round three. The next night, I resumed, not exactly sure where I was going to start, skipping a full backup. Read some more stuff, UEFI/GPT/MBR etc, thinking 3 strikes and you’re out, I decided just to rerun the recovery the same way, paying attention to various options I’d read about. Reconnected the SSD. In doing it again, I think perhaps I didn’t actually mark all the partitions for recovery, but I’m not sure, it was late and I was tired. I let it run, expecting the same result.
After the recovery finished successfully, I rebooted and stared st the blank screen for 30 seconds or so, and was starting to think, great, it failed again. When I realized my monitor switcher had switched computers again. I tapped it back to the PC to see what was going on, expecting total failure. The windows desktop appeared instantly. Not only had it booted, it was close to finishing! Whoa. That usually takes minutes!
I let it finished, started Firefox and Thunderbird (email) and wow, it was quick. Not lighting, but super fast and smooth compared to before. It works! I shut it down, put the cover on the PC and put it back in its place, booted again (remembering to tap the monitor switcher) and sat back to revel in the glory of speed that the SSD had brought. I wasn’t dissappointed. The desktop was back super fast. I should have done this a long time ago!
Overall, the process was what I expected, time consuming and annoying but Frys local delivery was great, Acronis came through with the 2018 version and a great support site, and Samsung makes a great SSD that has revitalized our PC to the point I actually want to use it again.
