Latest upgrade to R500 that I bought Sept 2010
Posted: Mon Oct 02, 2017 4:40 pm
Just installed a 2TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD after imaging the earlier installed Seagate 1TB SSHD hybrid drive I have been using for years. The 1TB capacity has been almost used up with all the research material & OneNote notebooks I have created over the years, many GBs of stuff.I used the free Seagate Acronis software to backup my original SSHD installation of Win7 Pro 64bit & my other software & data. That took a couple of hours on another machine. Then I "restored" the backup to the new SSD - which took over 12 hours, didn't make sense. I got a couple of transient "chkdsk" error messages (which I had never seen before) during the recovery phase, I was able to cancel their suggestions & continue with the recovery.
This seems to have worked. Booting up the R500 was extremely fast from the SSD, as expected. First boot I got a msg saying that Samsung driver for the SSD had to be installed - although the boot process otherwise looked OK. Then I rebooted with the new driver, and it went well.
My R500 seems like a new machine. Other upgrades prior to this point: my 3rd OEM keyboard, having worn out two previous keyboards with all the typing I've done. 8GB RAM. I tried installing Win10 Pro as an upgrade, it ran but just did not seem worth the learning curve for what I got. So I have stayed with Win 7 Pro 64 bit.
Re-ran Windows Experience Index. HDD performance went from 5.9 to 7.8, other scores basically unchanged from the prior case. Base score was unchanged at 3.4 due to built-in graphics limitation.
Just for information of anyone who might be interested.