Studio 1558 - replaced HDD with SSD.

Just want to share a good little upgrade story.

I asked my nephew if he would allow me to borrow his Studio 1558 (6GB RAM - ATI Radeon HD 5470) to upgrade it from windows 7 to windows 10 before the free upgrade expires at end of this month.

He's kept very good care of his laptop, especially considering it is 6 yrs old and he uses it quite a bit (old'ish steam games, browsing, minecraft, etc).

The old 1558 is still in excellent condition other than it was sooo slow. Booting up took at least a minute. Upgrading it to Windows 10 took at least 6 or 7 hrs (maybe longer, but I went to bed and let it finish overnight). It did eventually finish though and I setup our preferences in the Win10 settings.

It was still dog slow. It had the original mechanical Seagate Momentus 7200 500GB HDD that it shipped with. But was making alot of noise. I got out my old 2009 MacbookPro which I don't use much at all anymore and cannibalized an old Samsung 830 Pro 512GB SSD from it. I had a hard time trying to format it for use in the Dell as MBR NTFS. Even using diskpart the SSD would never finish formatting. I downloaded Samsung Migration / Clone software and then also their Magician software. That did the trick. I connected the SSD externally via eSATA and 25 minutes latter had the old HDD cloned to the SSD.

The 1558 is only SATA II, not III, but the performance difference is now night and day. It is like brand new. Actually much faster than new. Boots very fast with snappy performance launching programs. I think the old Seagate HDD had serious issues. My only worry now is if the fan ever goes out or needs replacing in the 1558. I checked and this thing requires nearly a complete tear down just to replace the fan. Seems to be working fine for now though.