Supercharging your laptop with SSD Awesomeness
How do you make you laptop go superfast you ask? Well we all know that upgrading a laptop is a pretty limited affair. Most people just put more memory in their laptop and hope for the best; more is better right? How many people actually know that more isn’t always better but just cant help getting sucked in by that laptop with 4gb of ram. Well for the most of us 32bit operating systems are the norm and actually some of that ram is wasted.
I recently purchased a Packard Bell Easynote BG45-U-300 now I usually wouldn’t be seen dead buying such a brand but I paid £280 for this little beauty it has a dual core pentium (T2390@1.82GHz), 1GB of ram and a 80GB SATA HDD. It has an INTEL 965 / X1300 and 12.1” screen with a resolution of 1280×800. This machine replaced my much loved ASUS 901. In my opinion a 12.1” laptop beats a netbook anyday
One of the first things I did was upgrade the ram. I had some laying around and a few minutes later I had 3GB of memory on my laptop more than enough for my portable needs. The machine then in its current state was used for a month or 2 I could even use the laptop to play back 720p video with the correct codec’s installed. As time progressed I started to find the 80GB SATA drive a little restrictive so…..
The next upgrade I did was change the hard drive to a 320GB WD Scorpio Blue I choose to put a big disk in because I thought I would use my laptop to store my multimedia collection in another place (you can never have enough backups). I did this for a while and it worked well all of my music is ripped in WMA Lossless so it took up a lot of space!!
Then SAMSUNG did that viral marketing campaign “SAMSUNG SSD AWESOMNESS” and I had to find out what all the fuss was about I couldn’t afford 24 drives as shown in the video I could however afford 1 Samsung 64GB SSD MLC so I took the plunge.
How good are they you ask? Well in my opinion its one of the best upgrades you could make to a laptop computer not only has the SSD made this laptop superfast it boots Windows 7 in 35 seconds including the bios on the 320GB WD Scorpio it was just over a minute. It also has reduced the amount of heat that my laptop produced people who own an Easynote BG45 will know that its not the quietest of beasts but you look past it because it was cheap! Well the SSD makes the laptop noticeably cooler and the fans aren’t as noisy.
Very very soon I’m going to post some videos of a budget laptop booting with an SSD. The most amazing thing about this laptop is that all in its cost me £400 a far cry from the prices of the Mac Book Air, Dell Adamo and other ultra portables.
March 25th, 2009 05:24
Heres the video…
http://www.bumpytrails.co.uk/2009/03/25/supercharged-budget-laptop/
March 27th, 2009 15:52
[...] Upgraded Easynote BG45-U-300 [...]
April 9th, 2009 03:24
Hi there, has the SSD improved the battery life at all?
Also, have you experienced any of the random power downs other people reported?
April 9th, 2009 04:40
I suppose its improved the battery life a bit! The main thing I have noticed is that my laptop is so much cooler than it was before. No dodgy power downs is that laptop or the SSD?
April 9th, 2009 06:12
I heard there were some random powerdown problems with the BG45 in general. It might be the first batch or an earlier firmware.
I have been looking at Netbooks for some time, but I do love Win7 Beta at home. Beta or not it is pretty much how I like to work now. However it is a 64-bit key, so Atom won’t cut it. The idea of a cheap laptop, that I can do up over time; ssd one month, memory the next, 6-cell and so on. Also being Vista based an upgrade to Win7 in the future would nice over buying full retail.
I also slightly worried that I am looking at a Packard Bell. I have had nothing but bad experiences fixing friends old beige PBs in the past. It is worth noting that PB was indy, then owned by NEC and is now (since 2007?) an Acer company. Don’t know if that counts for anything, but maybe thats why the BG45 is so nice for the money.
April 9th, 2009 06:24
You know what! I could never see myself buying a Packard Bell either but this was so cheap I couldn’t resist! Mine cost me £280.
You can certainly put 64bit vista on the laptop because I have done so! All the drivers were easy to source and in most cases I just used the 32bit ones except for the graphics.
As for problems… sometimes the ‘Enter’ key does get stuck … that may say something about the build quality, but overall I’m very pleased with it. Much more versatile than a netbook.
Ebuyer have an awesome deal on this week check this out…
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/158888
October 20th, 2009 00:52
Hi,
I am suffering that “random powerdown problems with the BG45 in general” Chris talk about. Tried lots of things but problem is still there. Tried with Vista, XP and Ubuntu 9.04.
¿Someone can help with this?
Thanks in advance (and excuse my poor english XD)
Inaki