What kind of replacement hard drive can go into a dell?

Question

Hi,

I have a dell b100, the basic model that just turned 2 years old. It has the 2.53 celeron processor with 1gig memory. This unit is very slow. I know I bought a base model when I got this, but think it shouldn't be this bad after only 2 years. We only use it for basic "computing". I run anti-virus and spyware programs. Along with routinely doing the disk cleanup and defragmenter. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

I should mention that a sales person at a "big box" store suggested a new hard drive, but didn't offer any suggestions for a new hard drive. She just said that it would speed things up and save $.

Thank you

Answer 1

A few things to check for speed increase:

1.  How much RAM is your system actually using... After 2 years of installing "craplets" you might need more RAM  If you're running XP, Hit control-alt-delete, open the Task Manager, and look at the "Performance" Tab.  It will tell you your physical RAM  (You say it's 1GB, it will probably show less, due to shared memory.)

It will also, in the lower left hand corner, show you "Peak" memory usage.  If your PEAK usage is anywhere near the physical RAM showing in the upper-right area, you need more memory.  It may actually be HIGHER than the physical RAM, which means your system is VERY short on memory, and is having to swap your programs from RAM to Disk, which is a (relativly) VERY SLOW process.  Ideally, you don't want your PEAK usage to be more than 60% of the physical RAM installed, because your operating system will use "excess" physical RAM to cache the reads/writes from and to the disk, increasing performance.

2.  How full is your hard drive.  Unless you are using 75% or more of your availble hard drive space, a new drive might make a *little* difference if it's cache is larger, but not much. Even at 80 to 85% used, you won't see a HUGE increase in speed. (Open MY COMPUTER, right-click on the C drive, go to properties.  It will show you the size of the drive, and how much of it is being used.)  Try running Cleanup! from http://stevengould.org to get rid of your temporary files.  It will almost certainly find a LOT more stuff than windows built-in "disk cleanup" finds, and it's free.

3.  Antivirus?  Norton?  If you have norton, get rid of it, it one incredible pile of hmmmm...  It's slower and uses more memory than just about any other AV product in existence.  Try the 30 free version of NOD32 from http://www.eset.com  It's FAST, faster than any other product, AND it's incredibly small, in both download size and memory usage.

4.  What OS are you using?  If you have "up"-graded to vista, 1GB of RAM isn't nearly enough.  Vista is also slower than XP, regardless of how much memory you have.  XP will generally run a *minimum* of 20% faster than vista.  If you have a really fast system, it might not be noticible, (mainly because people with "really fast" systems have NEW systems, and upgraded from an older/slower system, so they just don't realize just how fast their computer is capable of running with XP, or even faster with LInux on it) but your systems isn't a "really fast" system, as you know.  It's perfectly adequate for something like Linux, even with a 3D desktop like Compiz-Fusion, ( See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhHCl8j_R... or many other videos on youtube.) or XP without a lot of extra junk loading at startup, but windows programs tend to add more and more junk at startup, to add icons at the bottom of the screen, hooks into the browsers etc, which all take away from your RAM every time you start the system.

Answer 2

more RAM = faster speed

If you just want an over all performance boost you should get more RAM(memory) not hard drive memory. You may also try reloading your laptop. That will probably help with performance as well

Any laptop hard drive should fit for the most part.