Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Norbert: I just ordered an Intel i7 CPU and ASUS gaming motherboard combo that supports both M.2 NVMe and 2.5″ SATA III drives.
Now I’m trying to decide on an SSD for it.
I know NVMe drives are a lot faster than SATA III drives, but I recently read that using an NVMe drive in a gaming PC will actually slow it down because it’ll clog up the PCI lanes, so it’s better to use a SATA III drive.
Is there any truth to that? [Read more…]
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Question from Robert: About a year ago I built a new gaming PC and installed Windows 11 on it.
A few days ago I installed this Samsung 980 Pro 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD thinking it would be a LOT faster than the hard drive.
Well, it isn’t. It actually takes forever for some games to load. [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
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…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
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…]