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I've been using a Dell XPS 17 Laptop since 2012, and I love it. Big 17" screen, full keyboard with a separate numpad, NVidia GPU and Waves Audio. Just a great package and perfect for development. And no problems upgrading from Win 7 to Win 8 to Win 10 Enterprise
But... I was finding it was running really slow the last few years. Updates were painful, Visual Studio took several minutes to start, overall just sluggish.
So last weekend I just bit the bullet, and got an SSD drive to become my primary drive. I had originally planned to remove the DVD drive and install the original drive in its place, but found that there was an 2nd empty drive bay! Bonus.
So got the drive in, and installed Win 10 Ent. fresh. It all went smoothly and all of a sudden this laptop was cooking again. It only has a SATA 2 interface, but still significantly faster. I am just starting the process of copying files across from the old drive and I couldn't be happier.
I hope this gives me another 3-5 years of life...
Andreas
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Andreas Mertens wrote: I hope this gives me another 3-5 years of life...
If I were you, I'd give it a good subnet mask, and be careful it doesn't catch the cortana virus.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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You really don't understand how big a different a second monitor, or n SSD instead of an HDD makes until you try it, do you? It's a much, much bigger improvement than doubling RAM ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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if you can bear it make the system fully/only SSD.
having a spinner in even as a secondary disk still causes some slowness.
- booting, file searches, indexing, other background tasks etc still slowed by any present HDD's
- worse: if SSD gets too full windows and other apps will move swap/cache to the second drive
if you really need the spinner for say large/bulk file storage consider moving [it] to NAS.
also remember: once you go SSD you will never want go back.
(pain in the ass when doing things on clients / other peoples machines.)
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
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I have a Dell laptop too and am very pleased with it, only problem is that it was fitted with a 128 Gb SSD and a 1 Tb hard disk. As Windows keeps on growing it is a constant struggle to free up space. Worst thing is that I can not turn on System Restore on C: as it is not possible to point it to the D: drive. 
More info here: How to Use System Restore in Windows 7, 8, and 10[^]
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RickZeeland wrote: I have a Dell laptop too and am very pleased with it, only problem is that it was fitted with a 128 Gb SSD and a 1 Tb hard disk. As Windows keeps on growing it is a constant struggle to free up space. Worst thing is that I can not turn on System Restore on C: as it is not possible to point it to the D: drive.
Open it up, pull out the 128GB SSD, put in 512GB or whatever and then use your tool of choice (Acronis, AOMEI, Macrium) to image the old install to the new SSD. Just remember to turn off BitLocker first.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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That seems like a good idea, I don't have BitLocker turned turned on so that should not be a problem. Good thing is that big SSD's are getting more affordable too.
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When imaging the disk I would recommend you to do a partition image and not a disk image. In my objective experience it gives less problems when changing disks / sizes of the system.
RickZeeland wrote: Good thing is that big SSD's are getting more affordable too.
512 Gb SSD are around 80€ depending on brand even cheaper
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Thanks, that's a good tip, and as the price difference between 250 GB and 500 GB SSD's is not that big anymore I think I will go for a 500 GB one. The bigger ones also seem to have slightly better performance.
On the Crucial website I found SSD's that are compatible with my Dell 7577 laptop, the NVMe model looks very promising:
Crucial P1 500GB 3D NAND NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD | CT500P1SSD8 | Crucial EU[^]
modified 7-Mar-20 7:36am.
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cheers
Chris Maunder
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And here I am thinking a 256 GB SSD is a pain...
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The bloating never stops 
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There is a saying which says - 'Things will happen only when they are destined to happen'.
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I have a Dell XPS15 that's now 3 1/2 years old. I would have preferred an XPS17 for the larger screen size and extra resolution that I enjoyed on my previous laptop, but either Dell Canada didn't carry it or it's been discontinued. No external monitor. My wife took over my large desk, so I'm stuck with a small one! But I have a 462GB SSD (strange number, that), so no issues with performance or disk space. And this laptop is so much lighter than the one it replaced (from 2011) that I couldn't believe it.
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SSDs are fast like scaled cat.
SSDs are impurvious to shock. - finally.
But.
They have an Achilles heel.
They die without warning totally and completely. One day they're a drive, the next day they are nothing more than a coffee cup coaster.
So back them up early and often to an external spinner drive or other media.
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OK, a SSD will make a substantial difference, but you can do even better. (If you're willing to splurge on a new machine.) Get a new machine, like a new Dell XPS. Make sure it has a M.2 form factor socket for a NVMe SSD. Get a Samsung EVO NVMe SSD. These SSDs have sequential read speeds around 10 times that of old SATA SSDs. Random reads are not so dramatically better, but are still very much faster. 
M.2 SSDs come in different lengths. Make sure you buy one that matches your machine's M.2 footprint.
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When it comes the extending the life of a system, SSDs did in the 2010s what GPUs did in the 1990s.
Although I'm no longer (much of) a gamer, so video performance isn't as important to me nowadays. But everyone can appreciate faster disks.
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I've been recommending them as the biggest performance improvement hardware investment since I bought a 64GB drive for a new server back in 2012. When the 480GB drives became affordable, I bought them for every laptop/desktop I use professionally and personally. They alone have extended the lifespan of 10+ y/0 hardware including the wife's 9 y/o all-in-one (i3) where a Win10 update had 'done it in'...she was ready to spend $800 on a new one. I convinced her to let me try a new drive, another stick of RAM, and fresh Win10 install...iirc it was around $350 after taxes. That system is now usable from a cold start in < 10 secs, and she is happy...one less old system in my garage! 
Now, the 1TB SSDs are the same price as the 480s I bought just a few years ago. I've got 2 with plans to replace the 480 in my main laptop as the system partition is almost full. I haven't decided yet if I will clone it or just start from scratch. It still has most of the HP crapware that came on it back in 2015 so I'm leaning on a fresh start. It'll take a few hours to reload everything, but it's a good chance to get rid of the cruft. A colleague gets the other one to replace (clone) the spinner in her 5 y/o laptop that has gotten frustratingly slow...besides, I don't trust spinners past about 5-6 years. Again, it's a good chance to extend the life of a system and save the time and expense of setting up a new system...at least for a few more years.
I have yet to have an SSD fail on me, but understand that when they do, the data is generally unrecoverable. Get at least one more SSD (since you have 2 bays) and use it for backups of the main drive.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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SSD is like crack cocaine
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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"Landmark Computer Science Proof Cascades Through Physics and Math:" [^] Quote: n 1935, Albert Einstein, working with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, grappled with a possibility revealed by the new laws of quantum physics: that two particles could be entangled, or correlated, even across vast distances.
The very next year, Alan Turing formulated the first general theory of computing and proved that there exists a problem that computers will never be able to solve.
These two ideas revolutionized their respective disciplines. They also seemed to have nothing to do with each other. But now a landmark proof has combined them while solving a raft of open problems in computer science, physics and mathematics.
At last Alan Turing can get some rest (because this proof possibly solves the "halting" [aka "decision"] conundrum).
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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BillWoodruff wrote: ... while solving a raft of open problems in computer science, physics and mathematics.
What an amazing age we live in:
- Science (and math) is moving ahead in leaps and bounds
- and humanity is moving twice as fast ... albeit in the opposite direction.
Who's worried about a zombie apocalypse??? we've got people!
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Don't remember who told it, but accurated too:
Quote: Humanity is winning knowledge with incredible speed, pity that it is losing wisdom even faster.
(or something like that)
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Imagine having been born in 1895. By age 50, you would have gone through WW1, the Depression, and WW2.
But I would agree that many things are headed in the wrong direction, wisdom among them.
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I was singing in a church choir, doing the Mozart "Coronation Mass". The conductor made some remarks about what some people managed to achieve at an age of 23 years. I couldn't resist raising my hand and remark: "Yeah, and at your age, he had managed to be dead for five years!"
The entire choir, and the conductor, went remarkably quiet after my comment.
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Nelek wrote: Humanity is winning knowledge with incredible speed
Or just stealing it[^].
This is common knowledge that I remember first reading about in Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, back in 1986, so some knowledge-winning, it seems, is more a case of looking for ideas to put one's name on, so that people in the future will believe they are yours.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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