Speed up That Old Computer

By BD Bondy

If you have an older computer that has a mechanical hard drive, then you might consider swapping it out for a Solid State Drive, or SSD. The prices of SSD’s are much more reasonable than they used to be, so as a fairly inexpensive way to keep your computer going and speed it up, consider cloning the drive onto an SSD.

A 500 gigabyte SSD costs $40 to $50 these days, on Amazon. Sometimes they are cheaper. Macrium Reflect has free software that allows you to clone your drive. The last thing you might need is an adapter cable to attach the SSD to your computer, and that is less than $10.

Once you have all that, you attach the new SSD to your old computer, start Macrium Reflect, and ask it to clone your old drive. Reflect will ask you where to clone to, so select the new SSD. Go thru the prompts and it will finish in whatever time it takes, depending on your computer. Most clones will take about 30 minutes but it will depend on the size of the data and your particular computer. A hard drive with very little space could take several hours, as could a very slow computer.

Once the clone is finished, you should be able to simply swap the drives, and the only thing you should notice is how much faster the computer is. I know I make it sound simple, and it really is, but if you are unfamiliar with it, or uncomfortable doing it yourself, then please ask for help.
You can read about cloning on Macrium’s blog HERE. 
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