I spend most of my time in front of a desktop machine which serves my needs splendidly. But I also like to breath new life into old macines. Such was the case for a Lenovo X130e ThinkPad. It came with Windows 7 Pro and was absolutely lethargic - it had a 320GB Hitachi 'spinner' I got it from someone who had wiped the W7 and tried putting Linux Mint on it. Almost worthless. I got it for $35- including shipping and power supply. Removing the old drive was easy - 3 screws to completely remove the bottom case shell, and 3 screws to release the HDD. I reassembled it, inserted a real MS consumer release Windows 7 Home USB and booted. I have it the entire 512GB. About an hour later I had an operating W10 (first release.) I didn't need to enter the activation key, the installer found the OEM license key on the motherboard. I put a 21H2 upgrade flash drive in, and launched SETUP. About an hour later it was installed and getting additional updates. Next morning (1/16/24) appears to be a 'Patch Tuesday' so it did some more updates and has settled down. I am mow loading my usual stuff and I am impressed by its responsiveness.
You can go to YouTube or various web sites to get all sorts of benchmarks etc. I just go with simpler sthings. For example, I wiped the HDD drive of Mint and GRUB etc. and did a clean install of W10 home. That install had none of the usual (expletive deleted) software that is often bundled on a manufacturer's install. It took 93 seconds to go from power-on to entering password and being able to click the Windows START button. That wass original release of W10 from MS USB. I decided to put the SSD in as described. Cold boot to PIN is now 28 seconds followed by very few seconds to get to the start button. I don't need to know that there might be something that is 1.015% faster than something else on a sector fetch, I am just happy that I won't need to make excuses for using a 10-year old notebook on the few occasions that I venture out.
| Hard Drive | 240 GB Solid State Drive |
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