Replacing laptop HDD to fix low RAM

Moeniebrothersurely · October 9, 2018

Hello everyone

My friend bought a laptop (Lenovo ideapad) that only has 4gb of ram, which is not upgradable. It has a 5400rpm HDD and when they try do anything other than a few browser tabs and a few documents the ram fills up and it slows to a crawl and even freezes in some cases.

I was thinking that I could install an SSD to allow faster swapping and alleviate the bottleneck.

Do you think this would work or should they buy a new laptop with more ram?

Thanks :)

porina · October 9, 2018

I assume the laptop was cheap? I assume the spec of the laptop wasn't that great either by current standards. A SSD will certainly help but doesn't really fix the original problem. Concern might be, if you do a lot of swap, is that the SSD will wear out faster.

Moeniebrothersurely · October 9, 2018

8 minutes ago, porina said:

I assume the laptop was cheap? I assume the spec of the laptop wasn't that great either by current standards. A SSD will certainly help but doesn't really fix the original problem. Concern might be, if you do a lot of swap, is that the SSD will wear out faster.

Thanks for the reply!

Yeah I thought about that but they don't use a lot of their drive so surely I can deallocate some of the SSD so it can use that when it starts to wear out?