Minion Grace Upgrades Her Computer

Minion Grace got a Crucial SSD from Papa Ffreeze to upgrade her computer.  Her computer was purchased late in 2013 as a Christmas present and it was a refurbished HP DC7900 (Intel Core 2 Duo 3GHz, 2GB DDR2 RAM (now 8GB) 160GB HDD).  It works great for the kids... er Minions, but I know it is slow.  Mommy and I got her a Crucial MX100 128GB for only $67 to breath new life into the PC but we had a problem.  How could we get her a $67 "gift" just because and expect her to appreciate it?

/ponder

I know, we will make her work for it!  She could do chores for it but I like to be creative and kill as many birds with one stone as possible.  

To get the drive she will have to:

1. Benchmark her system before and after the upgrade
1. Teach her about performance testing (never too young)
2. Do the physical install herself
1. Loose the fear of "hurting" a computer
3. Spend time learning from Papa
1. OK, that one was for me!  =)

3 Birds with 1 stone, not too bad!

Minion Grace and I got it opened up and then realized we had not benchmarked the baseline yet because we were to eager to get going.   

She doesn't seem too upset

Without getting too complicated we have to find a way to quantify the performance increase (if there is one).  (160GB HDD to a 128GB SSD as if there wouldn't be!)  We decide to boot the PC and time it until Steam service pops up a login screen.  Most, if not all, of the booting is done by that time.  While this method is not terribly precise I think it will work for a preschooler that doesn't know how to read yet.  =)

Turn on the PC and start the timer

Jump up ...

 ...and down while waiting for the Steam black box to show
(this is SOOO exciting!)

As she doesn't know her numbers or letters yet I had to help her a bit.  She was able to copy down the raw data though.  We of course took data from 3 runs each benchmark so we could note the standard deviation (HDD 0.57735 vs. SDD 0.57735).  That is not a typo, you do it!

Recording performance data

Now we get to get back into the case and let the REAL fun begin!

Picking it up after unplugging everything

This thing is not light

Can't drop it

Just get the corner ...

Almost got it

There!

Next up is to put the SSD in the computer.  As it was Minion Grace's PC she did all the work.

Screw in the SSD into a 2.5" to 3.5" converter

Make sure all 4 screws are in but not too tight

It FITS, I am so happy!

Running a Windows Experience Benchmark

The completed HDD to SSD upgrade report

Minion Grace's PC is a new PC for everything except rendering graphics for games.  It went from taking over 3 minutes to boot to booting in 32 seconds!  Wow, what a change.  You click on a program and it loads, get this, this year!  =)  I am waiting to see what the Nvidia 950 Ti is like.  We made save some money and stuff a full height video card into a Small Form Factor (SFF) case but that is another project.

What a great experience for Papa!  I got about 30 or so hugs.  That works out to be about $2 for a genuine hug.  If only the rest of the world worked like that.  The exciting thing is that it didn't stop there!

To be continued...