As the computer person of the family I have the (dis)pleasure of playing tech support. This time I tried to get Outlook to connect to Gmail on an HP G70t-200. The problem was, the laptop was so slow I had no patience to try to troubleshoot the problems.
The HP G70t-200 spec: Core 2 Duo T6400, 3GB RAM, 250GB HDD.
My first thought was to get a new PC. HP is currently selling the 17z at a good price. Configured with a 1600×900 display, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Ryzen 3 2300U, which I find a decent configuration for its purpose, it’s just $500. (I made fun of 1600×900 displays recently online, but they’re good for older people who want everything to look big anyway.)
My second thought was how to make the current laptop better. RAM can only be upgraded to 4GB. I thought of adding ReadyBoost, which is always a cheap way to get a PC to work better when out of RAM.
Then I remembered the Kingston A400 240GB SSD I recently bought for my Ryzen 3 2200G desktop. I installed it there, but I don’t use that PC much anyway, now that my plan to do comprehensive testing of it has died, and I figured I could spare it.
I backed it up, cloned it using MiniTools Partition Wizard. That didn’t boot, and I couldn’t easily fix it, so I put the old disk back, cloned it again with Macrium Reflect, and that worked. While doing this I learned that Macrium Reflect Free can now be used in business environments for limited purposes, which is quite nice.
Anyway, as I had hoped, this gave the laptop a new lease on life. It’s amazing how an SSD is the single most important upgrade for old computers to get them to perform significantly better.
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