I recently did something that cost me less than $150 and probably saves me 30 to 60 minutes a week. It’s something I’d been thinking about for a long time and finally got around to it. Like a lot of things that I put off doing, I asked myself, why didn’t you do this sooner?
Basically what I did was replace the hard drive in my computer with a solid state drive. I’ve got a Dell Latitude computer that’s a few years old now, but it’s a workhorse. It does everything I need it to do, including edit videos and things like that, but it’s starting to get a little bit slow.
I noticed it was taking a long time to boot up even after I did things to clean it up and optimize it and everything else, but it was just the nature of the beast. It was getting a little bit slow, and from time to time would take a long time to boot up. Whenever there was updates, it would take really long.
So I hummed and hawed and did some research and bought myself a solid state drive as well as a little kit to help install it, which it turned out I really didn’t need. The drive was around $100and the kit was $20 or $30.
Unlike some technical upgrades, this one went seamlessly. I basically cloned my old hard drive over to the new one, and swapped them out. I went from having a situation where when I would boot up, it would take me 10 or 15 minutes before I could start working. With this new setup, from the time I push power to the time I can actually be working on the computer is about 60 seconds, maybe a little less.
It is so incredibly fast even on this few year old computer. It saved me so much time because often what would happen is I’d go to the office or whatever hit power and then either have to stand there twiddling my thumbs or do something for 15 minutes. Sometimes there was something worthwhile to do and other times there was nothing worthwhile to do and I would just wait around.
Other times the computer was off and I felt like doing something or checking something, maybe putting in 20 or 30 minutes of work, but I would just often not do it because the boot up time was so long. Now I don’t even blink. It’s a beautiful thing. I just hit power, do some work on it and don’t even think twice of turning it off, turning it on and heading to the coffee shop or into the office. It’s powerful and saves me a lot of time.
Maybe you hear this and say, of course, you should have done that sooner. But just in case you’re a little slow like I am with technology and you find your technology being the bottleneck, maybe it’s time to reassess. Whether it’s a hard drive versus a solid state drive, whether it’s the phone you’re using that just can’t do what it needs to do for you or whatever it is, quit wasting time. Just do the upgrade and start saving time and being more productive today.
There you have it. Hope you’re having an outstanding day. God bless. Press on.
