How to make your old laptop work faster?

Do you have an old laptop lying around, but using it is just a pure nightmare? OS boots up long enough so you can grab a dinner? Everything works slowly and you can't just enjoy using your laptop? Usually it's not the fault of older and less powerful hardware. Sometimes it just takes a little upgrade to make it less painful to use it. I'll show you what I did with my Wife's laptop :)

I upgraded an old Lenovo Y550 (Intel T4200, GeForce GT 130M and 4GB of RAM). Apart from laptop :) you will need a few other things: an SSD drive (such as Crucial BX100 250GB), a drive caddy for second drive, some thermal  paste, thermopads, isopropanol, microfibre cloth or coffee filter, a can of compressed air, a screwdriver.

Main things needed to speed your laptop up :)

Step one - swapping your HDD for SSD. Difficulty: your five year old can do this. 

You will only need a screwdriver and an SSD for this step. We're going to do a really simple thing. Turn your laptop over, take out the battery and open up a small panel where the HDD is hidden. Usually it's somewhere on the edge, has it's own compartment. Now just move the drive to the side, disconnecting it and take it out, swap the drive in the bracket for your brand new SSD and put it back in the slot.

Thats how disconnected HDD looks like. Please, don't mind the rest of the hardware :P

Now just assemble it back. You will have to install a new OS on the drive - you can do that with a DVD drive if your laptop has one, or install from a USB stick. I'll install Windows 7 Pro x64 with a pendrive. It's good to have all the drivers somwhere around for the OS you want to install. You will find those on the manufacturer's website. You can just copy them to separate folder on a pendrive with OS installation on it and just use them after the installation.

SSDs are a lot faster than old platter HDDs, especially if you compare them to those lower end drives that are installed in laptops. You will notice a considerable shorter boot time and all of your apps will launch faster. Overall comfort of using your laptop will be higher.

And that's how a new SSD looks in laptop's drive bracket

Step two - putting the old drive back into the laptop. Difficulty: Your five year old will need a hand. 

Okay, we swapped the old and slow, but higher capacity (320, 500, 750 or even 1000GB) HDD for a faster, but smaller SSD. Currently the most cost effective are 250GB SSDs. So how do you get more space for your files? How to preserve the files from the old drive? We will put it back into the laptop, of course, but in other place ;). There is a DVD drive in a laptop which you can see on pictures in this post, but it stopped working a long time ago. We don't need it. So we will put our old HDD in that place. 

To do that you will need a laptop drive caddy, which you can get in some PC hardware stores. I got mine from online auction for just a few bucks ;) Small note - those caddies come in two thickness, depending on the DVD you have. Just be sure to measure it beforhand - it's either 12,7 or 9,5mm. Be sure to check the connections too - both the one that connects the drive to caddy, and caddy to laptop in place of the DVD. In most cases it should be a SATA - SATA interface, but it's better to avoid making a mistake :) In my case I needed a 12,7mm caddy. Put your old HDD in the caddy, make sure it's connected properly and you can screw it into place. 

Old HDD in a caddy

Now you will have to take the DVD out. Take the panel covering main compartment off (in some laptops you will have to find the panel closest to DVD) and find a single screw that holds the DVD bracket in place. Unscrew it and use your screwdriver to push the DVD out of the bay. Now take that small holding piece off the DVD and put it on your caddy, put caddy in the place of DVD and screw it. Usually you will get a masking frame for the caddy, so it won't look like your laptop got smashed ;D You can now format your old OS partition.

You've got two drives in your laptop now - fast SSD for your OS and apps and slower, but with more capacity HDD for other files. If you want to finish up on this step, it's a great time to clean the cooling fan. Grab a can of compressed air and dust off the fan. Just be sure to hold it in place so it won't spin around.

Step three - changing thermal paste. Difficulty: Find your five year old something else to do.

The next step usually needs you to completly disassemble your laptop. If you don't know how to do it, but are willing to learn - look for a disassembly video or a guide for your particular laptop model. Many laptops will be similar to disassemble, but there usually are some differences, that are good to know before you will want to throw your hardware out of the window.

When you finally get to the cooling system, you will have to unscrew it from motherboard. Take notice how the screws are numbered - it's the order you should screw them. Unscrew them in the same order or backwards. In case of laptops that are few years old, you will find some kind of fossil that was a thermal paste once.

Fossil on cooling system

Use a coffee filter or microfibre cloth and isopropanol to remove the old paste from CPU and GPU. Now do the same with copper plates on cooling system elements.

Next thing to do is swap old thermopads, which will help to move heat from the chipset and power delivery components of CPU and GPU. Look how they are arranged on cooling plates and compare that to elements on your motherboard. Use alcohol and fibre cloth/coffee filter to clean those elements. Cut out pieces of thermopad from a fresh strip (use scissors) and put them in place with tweezers. Now remove old pads from cooling plates, and clean those spots with alcohol. Last thing to do is to reapply thermal paste on CPU and GPU and put the whole cooling system back together :) It's a good time to dust off he cooling fan or radiators too.

Shiny! :D

Summary

After all those steps you not only sped  up OS booting, apps launching and you have more disk capacity in your laptop, but you also improved it's thermals and made it quieter by reapplying thermal paste and removing all the dust from cooling system. There is nothing else to do but brew yourself a cup of tea or coffe or open a beer and just enjoy your rejuvenated laptop :)

Nothing makes me more happy than clean and functioning electronics :)

Those are not the only things you can do to make your laptop feel like a brand new one. You could swap out or put more RAM sticks in there. I didn't do it, as this laptop has both of it's memory banks occupied, and it doesn't support more than 4GB anyway. This is even simplier to do than swapping the HDD to SSD, but be sure to check for compatibility and get the right RAM sticks. In many cases you can even swap the CPU. It is cost effective if your laptop has a lower end CPU from it's gen. You could increase it's efficiency or find a similar CPU that draws less power, so it will generate less heat. Every laptop is uniqe so if you're looking for a new CPU for it, make sure you know what motherboard and chipset you got and be mindful about cooling efficiency your laptop can provide. Lower end laptops usually have CPUs soldered to the motherboard and you will not be able to upgrade it.

It all comes down to cash you are willing to dish out for upgrading and what expectations towards your hardware you have. If you own an older high or mid end laptop, it will usually be more cost-effective to upgrade it rather than get a new lower end one.