I was going to post this in response to the much older SSD episode which I just got around to lis...

[G+_Matt Bonnett]

I was going to post this in response to the much older SSD episode which I just got around to listening to a week or so ago and just finished up yesterday's episode. Anecdotally (is that even a word?) I did this very same thing about 2 years ago on a laptop I was given. Inspiron E1500, fully specced out when it was purchased (2Ghz Core 2 Duo T7200, 2GB ram, ATI X1400 GPU, 1680x1050 display).

 

I haven't really used optical media in the longest time so did exactly what was covered. 60GB OCZ Solid3 in the main bay and an optical bay adapter to drop in a 500GB 'spinner' (Funny thing about that. The hard disk is SATA but the optical bay is IDE despite the main hard drive bay being SATA. Actually found an optical bay adapter to translate IDE to SATA and for the past 2 years has been working flawlessly with no noticeable performance degradation). Needless to say it really made this thing exceptionally serviceable. Other than not being able to play the latest and greatest games it runs great even today. If it wasn't for a small GPU issue with Windows 8 due to outdated drivers, it'd have zero problems running that as I have done.

 

I actually have a duplicate of the same laptop here with identical specs save for the SSD that I used as an 'auxiliary' machine (run them side by side and use a tool called 'Synergy' to share one mouse and keyboard between them) and the performance between them is night and day.

 

In fact this very same laptop is my daily driver these days until I get the greenbacks together to build a decent Gaming PC and then it'll likely remain as a 'do everything else' machine. :)

[G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ]

Well done, Know-It-All... well done. :)