fotoman150

I had my computer guy install an SSD because he said my HDD was the cause of my slow down of my computer. It was taking more than five minutes for my computer to boot up. He installed the HDD and now my computer boots up instantly. It takes 12 seconds for the first screen to come up and then as soon as I enter my passcode the computer boots up in less than one second!

I thought the answer would be more RAM. My computer guy really knows what he’s doing. He’s a guy in his 50s like me an old-school guy, an old timer who knows the old stuff and the new stuff. You wouldn’t believe how happy I am. Just wanted to share.

WildBill Loc: South West Florida

A 1TB SSD can make a world of difference. Ditching the hard drive all together is a smart move. Now, if you install faster DDR4, that too will make more of a difference because you are not waiting for a HDD to find information on a disk.

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

More RAM is always a good thing.
--Bob

Just Fred Loc: Darwin's Waiting Room

My first response to "How can I speed up my computer?" is, "Throw it out the window." Thirty-two feet per second per second (32ft/sec/sec) is certainly fast!

WildBill Loc: South West Florida

"If you don't consider yourself a power user or a gaming freak, that humongous 8 GB upgrade won't make a difference to your computer. Going through your Task Manager will give you an idea of your computer's memory usage, which is the best way to decide if you really need that RAM upgrade or not." Techspirited

So, I am a power user and need fast memory and lots of it but most people really don't. I suspect you too are a power user and cannot get enough. If you don't have SSD yet, you are wasting money on memory. Ditch moving parts and go SSD and you will be very impressed

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

Entering top in a command window usually lets me know what's using what resources. I'm enough of a user to know one can't have too much memory, too fast a processor, or too big a hard drive, SSD or not.
--Bob

fotoman150

Lightroom boots up in less than 10 seconds. Now let's see how fast it edits.

Haydon

A NVMe M.2 in my i3 laptop on a cold boot will get me running in 7 seconds. Prior the 5400rpm HD took 30 seconds. Samsung's migration software made it effortless in transferring the OS and applications. Nice to have 2 HD's in the laptop.

sloscheider Loc: Minnesota

Yes, SSD drives are the cats meow! I recently purchased an older (2012) MacBook Pro, first thing I did was drop in a 250 gig SSD and install the latest OS. The second thing I did was order 16 gig of RAM for it. Works beautiful and with a 13" screen is my "sit on the couch" general purpose machine.

Many of the newer laptops (PC not Mac) have a dedicated slot for an SSD to be used as the system drive and a traditional drive bay for a larger data drive.

Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

So he did a total reinstall, I am on a Surface Pro with an SSD drive, believe me with time and all the junk one collects from browsing I believe that eventually your computer will slow down and personally I don't surf garbage or porn sites, stuff just happens these days.

joer Loc: Colorado/Illinois

Here are some things you can do in Win 10 to improve the speed of the computer. Computer usage tends to leave remnants behind that eventually impact speed. They are useless and elimanating them causes no harm.

1. Right click on the windows icon and click on run.

2. type in %temp%, then enter. Delete everything. Anytime "You don't have permission" message comes up just ignore it and continue.

3. Repeat step 1, type in temp, delete everything same as before.

4. Repeat step 1. type in prefetch and delete everything that will delete.
There are a few items that won't delete along the way and that's ok.

5. Find disk cleanup using search and run that. This can take awhile especially if there have been major updates. Use this sparingly as it will prevent rolling back to earlier versions.

6. Run defragment drives for HD, not necessary for SSD. This should be the very last step.

Do this every couple of weeks or more depending on your computer use and the computer will reward you.

Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

Thanks, just did that and the computer seems a great deal faster.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Not surprising. In 2012, when I worked for them, I went to a Lifetouch winter sales meeting. Julieanne Kost, Adobe Software Evangelist, and Master Trainer (http://www.jkost.com) gave a session on Lightroom and Photoshop. She was using a new MacBook Pro with an SSD in it. Her full size raw images were popping onto the screen in about one second, which was highly unusual at that time. That was the moment I knew that SSDs were a license to speed! I asked her about it, and she said the Adobe tech people had souped up her machine.

Fast forward to today... SSDs are far more affordable now. RAM is also. I always tell people these things about speed:

> Once your spinning hard drive is over about 75% to 80% full, your computer runs out of "breathing room" to cache temporary files, swap files, etc.

> There are some either free, or low cost options to try first. Offloading files to multiple outboard drives (multiple meaning BACKED UP) and then cleaning them off of the internal drive is one way. Clearing old caches and temporary files is another. Running some sort of directory checking and repair utility is yet another. If your hard drive directory is corrupt, the drive will act slow and flaky, or not work at all!

> Running multiple applications at the same time can slow down your computer if you don't have enough RAM. The OS has to keep swapping files in and out of memory, onto and off of the hard disk, just to keep running normally.

> It pays to close all applications, then shut down safely and completely, wait a minute, and then reboot your computer every now and then (at least every week). That helps manage memory, remove corrupt code from memory, clear RAM fragmentation, and more. It's usually a GOOD idea to leave your computer running overnight, however. Just put it to sleep. It will take a "power nap." Operating systems run lots of maintenance tasks while you are sleeping. If you don't want to do that every night, leave it on overnight AT LEAST once a week.

> A 7200 RPM hard drive is 33.333% faster than a 5400 RPM hard drive. That's somewhat noticeable.

> An SSD can be 80 to 100 times faster than a 5400 RPM hard drive. That's EXTREMELY noticeable.

> 16 GB RAM is now the minimum I would advise anyone to put in a Mac running the Mojave OS (10.14.3) or Windows 10 for heavy image editing. After about 24 GB, however, most users reach the point of diminishing marginal returns on RAM expenditures. But it won't be long until 32 GB is highly desirable.

> Adobe advises running Lightroom on computers with 12 GB or more RAM. I recently upgraded from 8 GB to 16 GB and an SSD, and WOW! What a difference that makes.

> If you can adjust the amount of memory your application(s) use, do so, striking a good balance between ability to run multiple apps, and the performance of your most-used apps. Photoshop CC is one example...

> If your software is highly PROCESSING-intensive, as in multi-track audio editing, or 4K video editing, then a faster processor (i.e.; a new computer) can help a lot.

> If your software is very input/output intensive, as in image editing, printing, multi-track audio editing, or 4K video editing, then an SSD can help a lot.

> Most non-commercial (home) users can speed up an older machine enough to avoid buying a new one until the operating system cannot be upgraded.

fotoman150

I’m sure it will slow down again. I will have him tune it from time to time.

Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

I just did what a poster recommended which deleted a bunch of temp files and it made a big difference. I am running on an SSD so I was greatly disappointed in the slow down, hopefully this cleanup from time to time will keep things moving along quickly.