Several weeks ago I had a conversation with my friend Ian about the virtues of solid state drives; he had “upgraded” his and his wife’s laptops to Kingston drives which came with an operating system transfer kit. Not to be out done I began my research and found that although I normally comfortable purchasing memory for Crucial.com both Ian and a reviewer on the Crucial site agreed that that their machines were sluggish and performed poorly with the Crucial solid state drive. My friend returned his to Crucial and was more than happy with the Kingston drives. With this endorsement I followed suit and ordered a Kingston V+200 KR-S3040-3H 240GB solid state drive from Tiger Direct. In addition the drive from Tiger Direct had a reasonable price but not transfer kit. I emailed Ian and he assured me that I could use his kit when my drive arrived.
The drive arrived and I was anxious to get it installed. Did I call Ian and make arrangements to pick up the transfer kit? No! I’m excited as a kid with a new toy and I convinced myself that my older Storage Craft imaging CD would be as good as the Norton Ghost or whatever.
For business I have used the Storage Craft media for a number of laptops and workstations with no problems. I created the SC images with no problem, verified the integrity of the images, and restored them to the new drive including creating the larger partitions that I needed. Total elapsed time 2.5 hrs.; longer than the 45 minutes that Ian had experienced but I was willing to accept the loss of speed due to my older imaging software.
My Lenovo X100e is a couple of years old but I love the size and I’m not willing to give it up until I can purchase a new Windows Surface Version 2 (See the Walter Mossberg review, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204425904578074752984926268.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_RIGHTTopCarousel_1) sometime next year. I’ve never liked replacing memory or the hard drive in this little Lenovo because you must remove the back cover, carefully removing the screws, and lifting of the back cover. That said drive is simple to slid out and reinsert.
I fire up the laptop and get an error that “device is missing”, please insert installation media. Fortunately, I had copied the Lenovo recovery patrician which could restore OS to the factory default but since I needed my data I restored the system to July 2012 to preserve my exiting data. The restore lasted about an hour.
My Windows 7 Professional laptop now starts but I can’t say anything about improved speed only quieter. I disable the disk defragmenter (no longer needed) and review system Services and note that not only can I not access Windows Update but that service is missing. To repair file system errors I ran “sfc /scannow” command line utility to “Check for and Repair Damaged System Files while Windows is Running“. I restarted the laptop and ran Windows Update.
To date I’m still running the laptop although sluggish in the beginning but after the first several days the hard drive seems to function at about the same response level as the original spinning hard drive. I wonder if I had used Ian’s transfer kit would it have made a difference..