How to Increase Laptop Speed?

Recently I found out that there are two important things to do in order to increase Laptop speed, especially for processing-intensive applications like Video Editing tools, High-end Games, etc. They cost a bit, but nowhere near the cost of a new laptop with the specs I wanted.

The speed increase due to this upgrade is worth the cost I spent. The two imp. steps to increase your laptop speeds are –

  1. Increase your RAM size to as much as possible but within the upgrade limits prescribed for your laptop model.
  2. Change your rotating hard-drive to SSD.

These two are the main things you need to do to see a noticeable increase in laptop speed.

In my case, I was running a Video Editing application – Adobe After Effects on my laptop which had a total RAM capacity of 8 GB (4 GB + 4 GB). This made the laptop work very slow. So I arranged to remove one of the 4 GB RAM modules and installed a new 16 GB RAM. Now I have 20 GB RAM (total).

Actually, I wanted to upgrade the other 4 GB RAM as well, but my computer repair shop guy told me that it was fixed and non-removable! This is why it is important to research the upgrade capabilities of any new laptop you buy.

The second step they suggested – changing the hard-drive to SSD – is also a very useful trick to increase the speed of any laptop. I changed my 1 TB hard-drive to a 480 GB SSD. For a small additional fee, the repair guy gave an external casing that converted my old internal hard-drive into an external hard-drive that I am still using for data storage/backup.

Please note that doing these things yourselves through a local repair shop might void your warranty. Fortunately, my warranty had just expired when I upgraded the laptop.

You can approach the authorized service center – they’ll be glad to upgrade the RAM but am not sure if they’ll help you to remove the hard-drive and fix the SSD in its place. If they do, it’s good as this is also an important step that makes your laptop run faster.

This experience gives me an idea to save a lot of money during my next new laptop purchase. Since laptops with built-in SSDs are so expensive, I might buy a much lower-priced laptop with harddrive and replace it with an SSD through this local computer repair guy. I can do the same thing with RAM too – buy an inexpensive laptop with lesser RAM having a provision to expand/increase the RAM. I’ll immediately upgrade the RAM.

What do you think about this idea? Let me know in the comments section below.