Upgrading a laptop

hi my name is Carrie holzman and today I'm going to show you how you can easily upgrade your old slow mechanical hard drive in your laptop to a faster much more reliable solid-state drive and transfer your operating system all your data and everything so that you don't have to reinstall a thing it'll look and act exactly as it did before except be a lot faster and it's so easy anybody can do it let's get started I was contacted by a customer who wanted to determine if their laptop could be upgraded or improved they said it was running slow they purchased this lenovo branded laptop about 2013 it's a 2018 now and it's actually decked out pretty nicely it's got a core i7 processor but for some reason it's got a mechanical hard drive although in 2013 I can understand why solid-state drives were still pretty pricey back then but the puzzling thing is it only has four gigs of RAM now he did upgrade it from windows 7 to Windows 10 and the question that he had is is it worth upgrading this or should I buy a new laptop well after figuring out that it was low on RAM and it has that mechanical Drive my answer to the customer was it's really up to you solid-state drive 500 gig solid-state drive is around I'll say that around $200 somewhere in there and 4 gigs of laptop memory ddr3 that this takes runs about 40 50 dollars and then there's labor so when you add that all together is it worth putting that into an older laptop or would you be better off buying a new one it really depends on who you are and what your needs are for this customer they said absolutely let's do it so we've got a 500 gig samsung solid-state drive well there are other solid-state drives that can be purchased for less money when you hear about people that have failed solid-state drives they generally have one of the cheaper ones I only use Samsung and SanDisk branded solid-state drives primarily because of the warranty and reliability I don't mind paying a couple extra dollars if it means peace of mind in the unlikely event that you're going to have a problem there are other brands that are more known for having failures I won't mention their names but suffice to say if you do not follow the steps exactly as I outline them in this video then you shouldn't expect the same results that I get in my customers get so there's a reason I picked these brands and if you choose to adopt that as your own well that would certainly be welcome if you choose to use a different brand to save money it may work out just fine or it may not but that's your gamble for you to decide if you follow once again my steps there's not much of a gamble here so that's why I use Samsung or SanDisk SSDs only at Samsung being my primary choice and the sandesh being the budget choice and then as far as the RAM goes I've got 4 gigs of ddr3 RAM that should be compatible this is made by Samsung and you might be asking yourself how did you know that you could upgrade the hard drive and how did you know you could upgrade the RAM so let's cover that right now the first thing I do when I get a customer's laptop is clean it and that means running utilities on it like C cleaner or bleach bit it means deleting all the temp files that see cleaner and bleach but may have missed emptying out all the system restore files get that nice and clean empty out this software distribution folder that all your windows updates went into that's all covered in a different video so I'm not going to repeat that here I also make sure all the windows updates are in place I make sure that the BIOS on the computer has been updated to the latest version to avoid any potential problems that a newer bios fixes I'll also use something like snappy driver installer and update any drivers that need to be updated I beer away from any peripheral drivers things like printers mice webcams I don't update those drivers and then the only one I avoid would be USB drivers generally speaking there'll be a driver update for your chipset maybe a driver update for your video card sound card network card I go ahead and do with those updates once all that's done and the computer is is cleaned I've looked through you know run malwarebytes through it run ncsoft make sure that there's no malware in there make sure that it's clean uninstall any unneeded programs that means taking off java taking off flash taking off toolbars taking off the McAfee security screen or whatever the security thing is people get it bundled with other downloads take that off of there and if there's things I'm not sure of I'll often contact the customer and ask them if they know what it is if the customer doesn't know at that point it's a matter of the judgment call as to whether or not to leave it or remove it so what I'm trying to do is get the computer is clean and as a lean as possible to see how it operates so I've already done that with this computer and let's see how fast it boots let's cover that first and then we'll talk about how I can determine what hard drive to put in and what Ram to put in so here I've got my clock my timer and I'm gonna hit the power button and hit the timer now one of the things you'll notice here let's see if you can see that as I've got the power adapter plugged in and that's because the vast majority of my customers many of them only are in Arizona for the winter months and many of them have laptops so they can move the laptop easily from their winter home to their summer home back and forth they rarely ever use the laptop on battery they almost always have it plugged in and as a result after the laptop is 2 or 3 years old these batteries are shot and the customers rarely ever care because they never run it on battery now there is gonna be a login screen that comes up that's gonna kind of interfere with our time assessment and I will blur out the customers email address which is on the login screen and then put in their password so we can continue the boot up process and then after that I'm going to switch over to again an HDMI cable right here and I will switch over to the on screen capture with the HDMI cable unfortunately many of these modern laptops the video outputs don't work into Windows loads so if I have to boot outside of Windows then I'll have to point a camera at the screen so you guys can see what going on so alright so you've seen the clock where it was at I'm gonna step up in front and I'm gonna enter the customer's password and there we go now we've got the desktop up I haven't been paying attention to the time that's your job if you guys want to look at that you can get an idea of how long the Machine takes the boot it really doesn't matter to me at this point because I know a solid-state drive is going to be four to five times faster than whatever this thing is doing in the best-case scenario now in all fairness the machine runs really well most of the time when people bring me laptops they're bringing me a laptop that's about this age about five or six years old but the problem is they bought a bottom-of-the-line laptop just an entry-level laptop when it was new it was cheap five years later they want to know how they can make it faster and if this was a core i3 laptop which many are or an AMD laptop I would not recommend putting the money into it but because this is a Core i7 processor it's a really good processor the laptop is in excellent condition and I do advise it is my recommendation that if it were mine I would do the upgrades I'm about to show you I think it'll easily add three to four years of life onto this laptop if not more providing it doesn't get dropped or stolen or have anything spilled on it and anyway so the question then gets to be well how do you know what the laptop has how do you know what the version of the BIOS is how do you know that information well I use a utility called CPU Z and I've actually got it on the desktop here but for the sake of showing you let's let's plug in to the video out then we get rid of this and let me give you guys a video feed of the screen okay so here we have the desktop and you'll see I've got cpu-z right here but I'm gonna delete this and we're gonna go and grab it I'm gonna show you how I do that so let's just get rid of that and let's empty the recycle bin out there we go okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up my browser this customer has Internet Explorer hooked up here and what you snooze that it's fine and we're gonna go to Google and I'm just going to type in cpu-z and hit enter and the first link that comes up here is cpuid dot-com that's what I want and we scroll down where it says download and I want the zip English version ditchin which includes the 32 and 64-bit version everybody should be using 64-bit at this point so I click on that and then it says the file is ready for download I click download now and we're gonna save that it's a very small download we can click view downloads and then go to cpu-z 183 that's the current version of course this video will be up for a long time and I'm sure that version number is going to continue to get bigger as time goes on these are the contents of the zip file we're going to extract all those contents just hit extract it's going to put it in our downloads folder and we can move it out of there if we want to and we'll just close these other windows out so here we are with cpu-z there's the 32-bit there's the 64 we're gonna double click on 64 and click YES on this and then we can close that window and now it's analyzing all the information in this laptop so we can see which CPU it has the code name of it just you know the speed it's running at its current speed it slows down in order to stay cool when you don't aren't using any real processing power the caches tab I typically ignore it doesn't matter it's whatever it's built into the CPU so there's no information that that's useful to me the mainboard tells us our BIOS version right here it says brand is Lenovo version is 2.0 for here and then the date that that BIOS came out and that's how I know what to compare against the Lenovo Support website for this model of laptop to determine if I have the latest version up under memory you'll see it's got ddr3 four gigs it's in single channel mode which tells me that there's only one chip installed and it gives me the frequency in clocks but this is the information I really want the information I really want is the serial presence device or SPD information of the RAM and you'll see it comes up blank well that's because it defaults to memory slot 1 and this laptop has two memory slots so we'll drop to the memory slot two and that tells me everything I need to know to buy a compatible memory module it's a a four gig module use its at speed 12800 and that's the only other thing I wouldn't want to know is the Kaz latency which on this one is 11 here and if I just buy another ddr3 four gig module it's at the same speed and latency Kaz latency of 11 the speed of 12 800 and I'm not sure why cpu-z shows that at 800 it should be 1600 but maybe that's a technical thing I'm sure somebody in the comments will explain to me why that's doubled but this this normally there's two ways that this can be said it can be set as 12 800 or it's 1600 I've never seen it listed at half before so again I'm not sure why CPU say does that but anyway that's how I know what to buy you can also go to a website like Kingston or crucial so we go up here and Kingston makes memory so we go to Kingston dot-com not a fine memory that's compatible with your laptop to find out how much memory total your laptop can see and this is very specific to laptops only you'll go under let's say if it's under memory right up here and then we're gonna go to desktop notebook memory and then you can do a search here or we can do something called system specific and that's where you can put in the make and model of the laptop you've got so in this case we've got a Lenovo so right here fine memory by system it's all alphabetized we want Lenovo this is a G 500s laptop so there's no G 500 listed there's a G 570 so how about just G Series notebook and this shows a maximum module available of 8 and then there's a four gig module so it appears this you can either use the two memory slots to go to 16 gigs or the two memory slots to go to eight gigs or you could mix four and eight and get 12 those are your options and that's it so in other words once you've put in two eights that's as much memory as you could possibly have now for this laptop with only four gigs I don't think the customer will see a benefit going to 16 so we're just gonna do four gigs now you don't have to order it from Kingston you could order it from crucial or you can go to ebay or I mean I don't recommend buying computer parts off eBay just because of warranty and return issues but you'll also notice they do list the speed at 1600 not the 800 you'll see the kaz latency is 11 CL 11 right there but as long as we have these specs ddr3 1690 ECC CL 11 with the right amount of memory 4 or 8 then it should be compatible with what we already have so if you want to order it again off Amazon or Newegg you don't after you you're not obligated just because you use Kingston's tool here that you have to order it from Kingston then our prices do tend to be a bit more than their competitors as you noticed the memory I purchased is from Samsung and I got that with Amazon Prime so I had it the next day after I ordered it so that is a very useful utility the cpu-z it's completely free you always see I use the portable version I'm not installing anything and that's how you know what memory to put in now when it comes to looking at the hard drive there's a couple different ways we can do that I'm going to close this out let's bring up Google again we'll go back to Google and I like to use a utility called crystal disk info so I'm just gonna type that right here in fact I don't even have to finish typing it you'll see it comes up automatically and here it is crystal disk info from crystal do world I click on that link okay so we're gonna scroll down and ignore these other editions this Shizuku and create Curie Kai I'm not sure how that's pronounced these are this is a Japanese culture thing you can look up Shizuku it's a whole there's a whole Wikipedia on Shizuku it just adds this anime girl to the program I don't know why anybody would find that necessary so ignore those we want the standard edition so we're gonna hit the download button right here in the middle and it's gonna ask us which one we want of course we want standard and I want the zip file and then we're gonna save that when it offers us it'll say you want to open or save it we want to save it there we go and it just takes a moment to download it's a small portable program you don't have to install anything now let's open it and extract all and then extract well that's extracting I can close that window and close that window and it'll open the folder that it just extracted to just as soon as it's completed here in just a moment then go and then we want disc info 64-bit edition so we'll double click on that oops double click there we go where are we sure we want to run it yes and then I'm going to close that window and what it tells us is the hard drive that's installed in here well I thought it was a terabyte it's just a 500 gig Toshiba hard drive it's sad a 300 and it's got a 5400 rpm rotation speed which is pretty slow 7200 would be preferred although in a laptop it does generate more heat and eats more battery power so another benefit of solid-state drives it's been turned on nineteen hundred and fifty four times in its lifetime and it's been on a total of 1261 hours which is not much at all so it appears that when they turn this on they have it on less than an hour for at least a third of the time which is interesting and that represents drive letter C and drive letter D all in this one hard drive the health status is good and it's running at 33 degrees centigrade now if the health status is anything other than good you should replace the hard drive there you should not attempt to repair a hard drive they really cannot be repaired there are programs like spinrite that can that can cover up the damage and may give you a little bit more life but it will still fail it's still in a failing State it's just whether or not you choose to close your eyes like I don't know an ostrich burying its head in the sand I don't recommend that and we're changing this hard drive out strictly for performance reasons there's nothing wrong with it it's just really really slow compared to everything else in this laptop how slow well let me show you what's we're done with this program so let's close it out and let's go back to Google and we're gonna download a program called crystal disk mark you're just typing that in the wrong space are not let's go Google and here we'll type in crystal disk mark it's already the third option down again it's the same company this crystal do world okay so here we are with crystal disk mark once again they have a standard edition and as Shizuku edition which just adds Shizuku the anime grill to the for every up we don't want the enemy girl we want the professional version here so we'll hit download and it's bringing up crystal disk info for some reason so we'll scroll down and there yeah okay so all the downloads are on this one page so could I grab them both at the same time so right here is crystal disk mark currently version 6.0 point 0 and we're gonna download the zip file and we'll save that once again small file should be relatively quick to download even on a slow internet connection we're gonna open that zip file up and then extract everything in it into a folder and I just go with all the defaults on that and I can close that window now and close this window there we go now we've got disk mark 64-bit and 32-bit I want the 64-bit I'll double click and then I hit all and what that's gonna do is that's gonna test the reads these are all reads on the left and then different writes these are all writes on the right if you have multiple hard drives in your system which I doubt if you've got a laptop but you can choose which drive you want to test right here but because we only have one I didn't have to adjust anything other than hitting the all button and then you just leave the computer alone for a few minutes and let this run and we will see our speeds of this mechanical drive and after we've upgraded to the solid-state drive we will run the same test again to compare just how much faster and worthwhile it is to upgrade your mechanical drive to a solid-state drive and honestly just for the reliability alone it's worth doing it now I've just skipped ahead to the end so you don't have to sit there stare at this to finish but you can see our right speed is one fourteen point eight megabytes not megabits megabytes it's a capital B megabytes per second and then our right speed which is typically always lower than the read speed is at 108 point six nevermind the rest of the numbers just just pay attention to those those two top numbers and now we can go ahead and close this out okay so that's how I get all the information I need to know before I offer any solutions to the customer and with that I went on Amazon as I mentioned I ordered the memory module and I ordered the hard drive which as it turns out is the same size drive he has now this is just a solid-state version of it not only our solid state drives far more reliable than mechanical hard drives they use less power which is good on a laptops battery life they don't generate as much heat and they're much much faster and reading and writing as you're about to witness now I like to use a program called a Cronus and a Cronus makes a program called true image and what I do is I buy the cheapest version of a Cronus trim Ajay can find I never spend more than $30 for it because there's always a new version every year so I currently have a Cronus trim egde 2018 on this flash drive and what I do is I purchase the product again I typically buy at Amazon and there will be a link to it in the video description below this video and I generally order the retail version so I actually get sent a box and in the box is the software and I don't use that software at all the only thing I want from inside of that box is my product key go to a Cronus comm in create an account and register your product key that was included in the box of the Cronus trim edge that you bought on Amazon or wherever you bought it and make sure you remember your login name and password that that you've created for a Cronus comm like any other software whatever is included in the box that you receive is probably outdated Acronis 2018 is the name of the software but it doesn't really tell you the version there may be four to eight versions of Acronis 2018 before Cronus 2019 comes out and what you want to do when you register that product key with the Cronus comm is it offers you the ability to download the latest version and one of the options to download is a rescue ISO image download that rescue ISO image which right here is called bootable media that's what we're gonna use to make our bootable flash drive and as you can see here it's about six hundred and forty five Meg's I'm just speeding past the download here so we can hurry up and get to the end now once this download is completed the next thing you want to do is download Rufus Rufus is a free utility we're gonna just type in Rufus right here on the top of the search bar and that defaults to my Google search engine which offers the Rufus is the very first option to choose from and here on the Rufus site if we scroll down we want to download the portable version of Rufus which is right here so click once to start that download it's a very small program as you can see it's already downloaded that quickly now using these two files we just downloaded we can create a bootable USB flash drive with the Acronis True Image software on it so the very next thing we need to do is find a USB flash drive to use for this now you really need a minimum one gig flash drive and it doesn't matter what size above that you use but be aware you won't be able to use the flash drive or any other space on the flash drive for anything other than a Cronus so if you use a 16 gig flash drive for this 658 megabyte file we downloaded the other 15 gigs our will be completely unusable to you unless you erase the flash drive and therefore erase the rescued us that we just made so I'm going to use a two gigabyte flash drive because that's what I have and we're going to just go ahead and plug that in now to a USB port on the computer next I'm going to go ahead and just click right here on the Rufus executable file we just downloaded and then this screen looks like it wants a lot of information but there's really just three things you need to check one make sure that you've selected the right flash drive the right destination if you have numerous flash drives installed for example you definitely want to make sure you've selected the correct flash drive because this is irreversible next we need to supply it with an image so right down here it says create a bootable disk using click this icon go to your downloads directory which is where it defaulted and there is our ISO image that we just downloaded this file here is the same as this file here they're the exact same file so we're gonna double click on that now it's defaulting using an ISO image which in most cases works fine but I've also encountered some images that don't boot properly when using the ISO image format so I have found that using DD image is much more reliable when using it to create the Acronis bootable media so I'm gonna go ahead and select that and then I'm gonna hit start now we are gonna get a warning here it says all the data that's currently on that flash drive is going to get wiped out it's going to be destroyed and if you click OK it's gonna you're approving that so again make sure you're at the right target Drive and then click OK now this just takes a moment and we will just fast-forward through this to get right to the next step that's all there was to it with the flash drive created go ahead and click close and we can also close out this window and eject the flash drive and you now have an Acronis of bootable media that you can use countless times on any number of pcs that will always work for you and that's just how easy it is to make that now with that I'm going to go ahead and turn this laptop off so let's go over here and power it down and I need just a regular Phillips screwdriver this comes in a computer tool kit these are little tool kits that contain a couple of screwdrivers and a couple common tools used with pcs and I'll put a link to one of these typical tool kits they're run about ten or fifteen dollars also in the notes below this video this video is going to have a lot of links to it I'm gonna just set the timer aside and I'm gonna unplug the HDMI cable here and I'm gonna unplug power and then I'm gonna turn this over and we're gonna take the battery out of it there we go it originally came with Windows 8 you'll see there's a Windows 8 sticker right there but let me show you how amazingly simple this is to work on there are just three screws here there's one here and there's one here and finally this one here and don't lose those are small this whole piece will slide forward and lift off and what that reveals below memory harddrive look at that look at everything you could ever want to get to it's just three screws away I jumped ahead just a little bit what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just lay this back on I'm not gonna I'm not gonna secure it I'm just gonna I'm just gonna set it back on there mm-hmm and what I need to do now is clone this harddrive so it's gonna take this brand new Samsung 850 Evo so here's our drive right here and this is just SATA on one end USB on the other lots of manufacturers make these they are usually around $10 to buy one let me go ahead and take the Acronis rescue's disc here and plug that in and let's plug power back in in fact let me put the battery back in - like I said I got a little ahead of myself okay now for some reason it's having difficulty booting to the USB flash drive in the USB slot closest to the front of the computer so I've moved it to the USB spot - this the one just behind it there's there's two of them here so I had it plugged in this one it just refuses to boot off of that so I've moved it now to this one sometimes it can be a challenge just as simple as getting something to boot off the flash drive maybe the hardest part of this whole upgrade and you'll see it started the x64 UEFI loader option one is a Cronus true image 64-bit so we're going to choose option number one and it's going to load a Cronus and what I'm going to do is set this other camera up here so you can see the screen [Music] okay so now you'll see that everything got a bit dimmer and that's because this is acting as a light source and so the cameras adjusting for it and what I'm gonna do is grab the Samsung drive that we're gonna upgrade to and we're gonna plug that into a USB port so I'm actually using all three of the USB ports one for the the wireless mouse one for the Bibble Acronis boot disc and then finally we're gonna plug in the drive we're gonna upgrade to and then we need to give that just a minute to be recognized just as any USB device requires a few moments from the operating system to recognize it so the first thing I'm gonna do is choose tools and utilities and I want to choose clone disk and it's gonna ask me what clone mode I want I leave it on automatic and click Next what is the source Drive the source Drive is going to be the Toshiba this is the rescue disk that we plugged into the the flash drive rescue flash drive so obviously we're not going to use that one and the Samsung doesn't appear because it's a brand new drive that's not even partitioned and therefore there's nothing to clone and Acronis is smart enough to not offer you that option is a source so we're gonna choose disc one and it gives us the layout of the drive here and we're gonna click Next now it's going to scan for potential target drives and that's when it should locate and offer us the option of the Samsung drive that we've got plugged in to the USB port this process can take a few minutes so be patient there we go you'll see disc 2 is still the USB rescue disk that we booted to that has the Acronis software on it we're never ever gonna choose that option this three says not initialized that's our brand new solid-state drive that's plugged into USB we hit next and what it's going to do is give you a layout of this is what the drive looks like now and this is what the drives gonna look like when it's done these are little partitions here here and here and that this is not reversible you're going to erase everything on your target Drive there's no go backsies you cannot undo this so you sure you want to do it of course this is a brand new Drive so we don't have to worry about overwriting you know any critical information here because the brand-new drive is completely empty so we're safe to proceed and we'll click proceed and it's often running now the Cronus time estimator is notoriously horrible and inaccurate depending on how fast your USB port is how fast your processor is how much memory you have and how much data you're transferring over will determine how long this process takes the Cronus always likes to say 16 minutes that usually means about an hour and 16 minutes in my experience but we're gonna let this run and then I'm gonna fast forward it at this point to the end so you don't have to sit here and stare at it it's like watching grass grow okay so here we are at the end you'll see it says that the disc was successfully cloned and of course the next steps that we have to take so we're gonna go ahead and click OK here and then we'll close this out and then we're going to shut the computer off by holding the power button in for up to 10 seconds until the laptop shuts itself off now with that done I can go ahead and remove the Acronis rescue USB Drive we save that in case we need to use it in the future I'm going to go ahead and unplug the solid-state drive and we'll go ahead and remove the adapter here that's ready to be installed now so I can go ahead and remove power and we're going to remove the Bela bat or eat next and then I'm gonna take this cover off right here there we go and decisions decisions where we want to start we can pop with a memory and easy enough I've got the memory right here I always want to bend the plastic to get the memory out and hold the memory by the edges avoid touching any of the chips or any of the little gold fingers on the end remember you don't want to bend the memory module out of the package you want to bend the package away from the memory module there is a slot in it so it can only go in one direction and you're gonna line that up on an angle as you see me doing here so I don't know how well you can see that here it is here you'll see it's in the track and it's seated so that the gold fingers are in the track or in the slot completely where you can't see them then I'm gonna push down on this very lightly it does require a little bit of force not much and then it just clicks into place and if that memory is compatible we shouldn't have any problems and I'll show you how we can test that in a minute next I want to remove this hard drive that's going to require removing this screw here in this screw here oh and there's also two screws one here and one here so let me do that right now again this is the perfect screw driver for the job these are little teeny tiny screws it helps to have a magnetized screw driver when you do this so that you don't drop the screws they can become very difficult to find if you drop one on the floor so there's the four screws removed and then this whole unit should slide so there's a gap here should slide towards that gap and it did and then lift it out so there is the mechanical drive there are four screws that hold this little metal hard drive caddy we have to remove and so I'm gonna take out the two on this side once again these are really small screws so it's important that you use a magnetized screwdriver and have a nice clean working area so that you don't misplace them you don't want to drop them they're very difficult to find replacements for and you want to pay attention to which direction the drive is installed so that you put the replacement drive in the exact same way which part is the front which part is the back obviously knowing one will lead you to knowing the other right so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna lay this hard drive right beside it with the connectors facing each other like this see how they're both the same direction and I can lift this off and place it right on here and that ensures I keep the direction of the hard drive installed correctly the first time so I don't have to take it back apart and do it again when I realize it won't go back in and of course these holes for the mounting screws will line up perfectly when you've installed the drive in the right direction I emphasize that because I've done it a number of times and I'm just tired of having to make that same mistake so I'm hoping that you will learn from my experience and follow that procedure so you don't have to wonder which way did this come out it's not the end of the world it's just very inefficient so here we go there's the last screw right here put that back in see how that magnetized screwdriver really helps me hold that screw into the proper position now we'll put that on right there if it will find the hole there it is okay and that just gets tightened down to the point where the screw doesn't turn anymore you don't have to over tighten it because all it's doing is securing the hard drive into this caddy then we're gonna put the hard drive back in exactly how we took it out which is the connectors are going to face the plug and we're gonna place it all the way here at the edge and seat it down and then we're gonna slide it forward it should just automatically line up that's what that caddy does it keeps the hard drive at the right position and it locks itself right into position there and now we're gonna use those four screws we just took out secure it back into position there's one once again don't over tighten these they're just there to secure it in place it's not gonna be watertight or anything like that worst-case scenario is that if you over tighten them and then later on you have to get in here for any reason that you could strip the screw or potentially break the screw trying to get out because you over tightened it so I always think about the next time you have to open it up that you're not going to have a screw missing because you didn't tighten it or have a screw you can't get out because you over tightened it so generally it's just a matter of turning the screw till it stops and that's it no further than that it's okay this is the third screw here that's gonna go right there and we have our final right here now normally I would just go ahead and power it on before I put it all back together but for the sake of Oh being confident I'm just gonna at least put the bottom back on it and we'll put the battery back in and plug power back in now the first boot may take a little bit longer because it's going to detect some new hardware but let's hit the power button and hit the start button and let's see how long this takes to boot this time now I did alter the boot order in the BIOS so it was checking to boot I think from a USB device I might have to go back in there and change that look how fast it's already come up with uh it's got a recovery here exit that it's reboot it I'm not sure why that came up it's a a Windows 8 BIOS protection is turned on in here so let's see what happens what I mean to say is secure boot I don't know what I just called it I don't know what I'm thinkin yeah we're so for some reason it keeps going into this into this restore area of this one key recovery and if this happens to you don't panic all your data is on the drive but for some reason it I think the secure boots been tricked into thinking you might have a virus so I turned it off I'm gonna turn it back on let me stop this clear that out let's do F whoops didn't hit it fast enough turn it back off again let's make sure our boot utility is designed to boot to windows first so we're gonna bring that up and then we'll exit and save see if I have any better luck there still may be secure boot but we'll find out here in a minute this looks better already yes okay so we're gonna do the timer again so let me shut it off and let me set the timer up so you can see it okay I've got the timer out let's go ahead and boot it up and see how long it's gonna take here we go eight seconds we're already at the desktop let me sign in as this customer there we are were signed in so to verify we've got eight gigs of ram memory instead of four I just right-click on the my computer or this PC icon and go to properties and right here it says we've got 8 gigs of RAM installed I know how well you can see that if at all but it's there and then of course we can run mem test 86 which is a free bootable flash drive you can make it takes about an hour hour and a half to run through all 10 tests and if it comes up without any errors you know that the member you bought is functional and compatible with any pre-existing memory although it's not a perfect test it's it's better than nothing and if it does come up with errors you will have to address that you may have a bad memory module purchase brand new what happens or an incompatible memory module even if all the specs line up on occasion you can still have an incompatibility and I've got a different video than diagnosing Ram so I won't get into that right now let's go ahead and check the hard drive speed now so let me go back to the Downloads folder here and we'll pull up crystal disk mark there it is and we'll run disk mark 64 hit all watch these two numbers up here remember what these numbers were before right I don't need this timer running anymore let's go ahead shoot that off so you can already see if I can zoom this in a little bit for you let's bring it in much bigger numbers there we're at a it wasn't a hundred and something hundred 116 something like that now we're at 537 and let's go ahead and let that complete and there you have it these are our final numbers that you can compare with the mechanical drive it's obviously much much faster let me zoom this back out and I'm just gonna wrap this up by stating that the last thing I'm going to do now is put the little screws back into that bottom cover here and I'm gonna download and install the Samsung magician software which anybody with a Samsung SSD should install they will tell you how much life is on the drive ensure and verify that you have a genuine authentic Samsung Drive and not some knockoff somewhere and most importantly it enables you to update the firmware of a newer firmware version is available and I recommend you do that if you see that you have an older version of the firmware if you're currently running the Samsung Magicians software you should always make sure you're running the latest version of the Samsung Magicians software as I make this video version 5.2 is the current version and this isn't something that happens automatically if you don't upgrade it it won't happen so rapid mode may also be an option you might want to turn on generally if you have more than 8 gigs of ram you can use some of that ram for caching and it's available on some samsung SSDs it will be an option available in the samsung Magicians software if it's grayed out that means it's not available for the samsung drive you have not a big deal if it is available to you you might want to experiment turning it on and seeing if you notice a difference in speed most people will that's the benefit of caching and there you have it it's just that easy to upgrade your own hard drive you don't need to pay somebody to do it it's very simple and of course you can use a Cronus to make image backups to use as backups as well and you would just follow the same procedure with an external hard drive you have laying around and that will do an image of your system so if your hard drive should ever fail you'll have everything and by everything I mean every temp file and every virus if you don't clean it before you make the image it literally takes every bit of data with impunity so I hope you found the video useful and educational and please hit the like button if you enjoyed it and would like to see more videos like this until next time my name is Carrie Holzman and I'll see you soon bye for now now no sooner than I fixed that laptop then the next one came in and this is more along the lines of what I'm accustomed to receiving for repair this is a budget laptop where it was in 2013 when it was purchased new let me give you a little close-up of this so you can see that when you pay less for a laptop you get less and just take a look for example here this looks like it would be an optical drive wouldn't doesn't it but it's not it's a solid piece of plastic covering the hole where a $15 optical drive would go manufacturers will take and cut every corner they can so bring the price of the laptop down you'll also notice where the battery is there's no buttons to eject the battery instead there are two screws that have to be removed to remove this battery that creates a whole different series of problems if you've ever used the laptop with a bad battery before and saw the effects it can have the actual motherboard doesn't even have a battery on it to retain the time and date if you ever take this battery out you lose your time and date your BIOS settings everything goes bye-bye has to be reset up again [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right well that's gonna wrap up this video I hope you found it educational and informative and as always I'll see you next time bye for now

Channel: CareyHolzman

Views: 2,001,592

Rating: 4.8028941 out of 5

Keywords: Carey, Holzman, Acronis, clone, how-to, DIY, RAM, ssd, hdd, upgrade, replace, go faster, copy, exact, precise, best, storage, nand, 3d, samsung, crucial, kingston, amazon, software, hardware, laptop, toshiba, dell, hp, acer, windows, microsoft

Id: 5RDhuHiAQLg

Length: 53min 20sec (3200 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 16 2018