So, I have a simple and effiective smasung netbook. N145 Plus to be specific. Windows 7 starter, 2GB ram.

It works well, has a good battery life, and a 200Gb hard drive.

Will there be any decent improvement in performance if I swap over to a SSD?? They seem to be getting cheaper by the minute.

IT boffins please respond.

IMO the single biggest upgrade to any laptop or desktop. Aria have some good deals on now and again.

I’ve just swapped the hard drive from my Samsung netbook (n220) for a sata3 ssd … its made a difference but not much! the CPU is too slow and is much more of a bottleneck than the hdd. on a newer dual core netbook it might make more of a difference.

Neb, how has it affected battery life?

its about the same, maybe ever so slightly better. I bought the sata 3 as I thought I’d put it my next laptop. To be honest a sata 2 drive would have the same performance.

Look for a Samsung 830 or Crucial M4. Heard bad stories about some of the others.

my old n120 (I think) loves it’s SSD the startup and shutdown times are phenomenal. Still not fast enough to watch most web videos smoothly though.

it won’t help in cases like videos where the CPU or graphics are the bottleneck. But it will massively speed up booting, hibernation and any programs you run off it – ie things like opening up windows, excel etc will be A LOT quicker.

My laptop has a 32gb SSD and a 750GB HDD. I am going to ditch the 32GB SSD for a 128GB one and install everything onto it and keep the HDD for storage. Currently it just uses the 32gb SSD as cache so hibernation is pretty much instant and commonly used files are stored there as a pre-fetch.

Just popped one in my Samsung NC10, it’ll still struggle to play HD but its defrost fast.
Boot times are about 30secs

Worth the 60 quid IMO

If Win 7 starter don’t bother spending extra on SATA 3 when SATA 2 drives are much cheaper. Keep an eye on Hot UK Deals; I ordered a 120GB OCZ drive from Scan for less than £40 yesterday.

Thanks folks, looks like I’ll be off shopping soon.

It is a dual core processor, and I have been toying with buying Win7 Premium for it. Maybe even proper MS Office too. Damn the expense!!

Does it have an SD card slot? If so, get a fast card and do readyboost. It helps, and I’ve found on my Vaio P that two cards helps quite a lot!

molgrips – Member
Does it have an SD card slot? If so, get a fast card and do readyboost. It helps, and I’ve found on my Vaio P that two cards helps quite a lot!

OOoo, I’ll try that, yes, I’ve got a Class 10 card out of the camera (which has been replaced by a bigger one).

Ta for the Idea…