The laptop lives — in the fast lane

Posted on December 13, 2005 No Comments

The new hard drive (Hitachi 7200 rpm) showed up yesterday! Got it home around 3:30 in the afternoon and proceeded to go to work on it.

Swapping out the old drive (Hitachi 4200rpm) to the new one was very easy. Basic maintenance on laptops has sure come a long way over the last decade, eh? Remove a few screws, slide out a little cage assembly. Remove screws from cage, drop out old drive, drop in new drive. Replace the cage screws and drop it back into the laptop. Probably took 5 minutes and I was booting from the XP Pro CD.

The install itself was uneventful. The full format took forever and had me a bit concerned about exactly how speedy this new drive really would be. But the actual install went fast and now that I have it all up and running I have to say it is definitely faster. Reboots take around 30 seconds. Holy cow! Launching apps is noticeably faster too. So yeah, want to zip up a notebook? Dump that 4200rpm drive (no clue on cache size) and get a 7200rpm drive with an 8MB cache. *vroom* Will be interesting to see if this impacts my battery life — I’ve been spoiled by the 3 - 4 hour battery life with this thing.

Had to take a few hours break last evening to attend the daughter’s band concert (lovely event, btw) and then got back to it. [small rant: don't you just hate how often you have to reboot a machine while doing the initial patching and driver installs?] Was up rather late installing software and looks like I have a morning full of the same. But it is coming along nicely. Have to head downtown this afternoon for some client meetings and I think the laptop will definitely be ready by then.