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:
- Benchmark her system before and after the upgrade
- Teach her about performance testing (never too young)
- Do the physical install herself
- Loose the fear of "hurting" a computer
- Spend time learning from Papa
- 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.
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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. =)
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Turn on the PC and start the timer |
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Jump up ... |
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...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!
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Recording performance data |
Now we get to get back into the case and let the REAL fun begin!
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Picking it up after unplugging everything |
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This thing is not light |
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Can't drop it |
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Just get the corner ... |
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Almost got it |
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There! |
Next up is to put the SSD in the computer. As it was Minion Grace's PC she did all the work.
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Screw in the SSD into a 2.5" to 3.5" converter |
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Make sure all 4 screws are in but not too tight |
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It FITS, I am so happy! |
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Running a Windows Experience Benchmark |
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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...