How To Identify Computer Speed

As already mentioned the best bang for the buck is to use a SSD for your OS drive and for my last two laptops I have made sure each has a DVD/CD drive and a reasonably sized HDD (500GB min). I then buy a HDD/CD drive tray and replace the OEM DVD/CD drive with that along with a 256 SDD. I then clone the factory drive onto the SDD and use that as my primary OS. The original HDD becomes my backup OS drive along with my primary data drive along with the storage for my onboard Acronis periodic backups. The only additional program on the original OS drive directory is a copy of Acronis that I can use w/o reverting to a DVD/CD Acronis boot disk for any system recovery I might want. Of course that original OEM HDD also has the recovery partitions on it. This last laptop I also had the factory remove all the third party "junk" that often comes on drive like the 30 day trials of McAfee or Norton, games, etc. so I truly have a "clean OS" to start over with. I had to pay like $30 to Toshiba for this "clean OS" install version, but IMO it was well worth the small cost since it got rid of all the skeleton directories and files along with orphaned registery keys that are left if you simply use the windows program remove function.

With that setup I always have a clean OS on the original HDD albiet w/o all the updates that I can use and as I put the new programs on the SSD I keep the install files used in a special directory called "SSD Pgm install files" so I can take the original HDD clone it to a fresh HD and then update it to what was the last OS drive configuration that was on the SSD.

Larry