Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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Question from Kyle: The hard drive in my computer died and I replaced it with an SSD per your suggestion.
I’ve read that SSD’s are a lot more reliable than hard drives and that they rarely go bad.
My question is do I need to back up my SSD like I did my hard drive? [Read more…]
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Question from Mike: First of all, I love your blog, Rick. Your tips have helped me a lot over the years.
Now I need your help with an SSD upgrade if you don’t mind.
I’ve read several of your tips about replacing a hard drive with an SSD.
Some of those tips discuss cloning the contents of a large hard drive to an SSD that has less storage capacity than the hard drive, but my situation is exactly the opposite. [Read more…]
Question from Larry: I read your post explaining the advantages of installing an SSD a while back and I’ve wanted one ever since to go in my HP desktop PC.
I ended up buying a 120GB SSD (I got it for $20!) and installed it as the boot drive in my HP desktop computer. I left the 750GB hard drive in there for extra storage.
I installed Windows 10 from scratch on the SSD and now I’m ready to install my programs. The thing is with only 120GB of space on the SSD it won’t hold anywhere near all of my programs.
I have a couple of questions for you:
1 – Which programs should I install on the SSD and which ones should I leave on the hard drive?
2 – Should I leave the original Windows 10 files on the hard drive or is it safe to delete them to free up that space?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
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Question from Joseph: I have a 2009 era Dell desktop that’s running Windows 7. The hard drive began acting up a while back so I replaced it with a 128GB SSD.
I’d now like to replace the Windows 7 with Windows 10, but I’ve heard that a 128GB drive isn’t big enough to hold Windows 10.
Will I need to replace the existing SSD with a bigger one before installing Windows 10?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
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Question from Pete: I read your post about speeding up a PC by replacing the hard drive with an SSD. Thanks for such an awesome tip!
I ordered a Crucial 1TB SSD to go in my old HP DV7t-7000 laptop and it arrived today.
When I went to install it the instructions said to set the SATA port to AHCI mode in the BIOS settings. The problem is I couldn’t find a way to make that change in the BIOS.
I emailed HP tech support and asked them how to change to AHCI mode in the BIOS and they said I can’t because that setting is locked out in that machine.
My question is will an SSD not work with this laptop? [Read more…]