Once You've Used a Solid State Drive

     I am spoiled.  I fully admit it and feel no shame.
       Last May I used my income from an online teaching contract to buy a new laptop.  My workhorse laptop, a circa 2014 HP Pavilion, was showing signs of distress -slow to load, fan running constantly, despite my best efforts to defrag the drive, keep malware scanners and software scanners up-to-date and frequently running. No doubt being in an environment of cat and dog hair, wood smoke and general household dust didn't do much to keep the air circulating and the hard drive sufficiently cool.  By Mid-May, I felt I was losing valuable time waiting on the laptop to respond, and I decided a new unit was necessary.
     For a time I debated buying a 21" monitor or larger to pair with the smaller convertible laptop I bought in March 2017.  It was working perfectly but it only had an 11" screen.  This was fine for day-to-day work between job sites but would not be comfortable for long-term, consistent day-to-day use.  Its mere four gigs of RAM was also a limiting factor.
     I decided to go with another laptop 17-inch monitor.  I am used to the display and the size and feel of the keyboard.  I am not the world's best typist, so consistency is nice.  I also knew I wanted an HDMI slot and several USB slots. Wi-fi was a must, a network jack nice, and Bluetooth optional.
     My husband calls me a power user.  I often have several windows and many applications open simultaneously. Consequently, memory resources often become depleted. Now, serious gamers would no doubt scoff at this "need" for resources, but to me, this was a big deal. I suspected nothing less than 16 gigs of RAM would be sufficient.  
     My last want was a solid-state drive.  My husband had been talking about upgrading his "build-your-own" for years and wanted an SSD.  He was waiting for the price to come down and frequently mentioned his desire for this type of drive.  I made an SSD my first criteria, after screen size, and found several laptops with SSD drives within my price range.
     I settled on an HP laptop from Newegg. It has a one terabyte SSD and a one terabyte hard drive with 16 GB of RAM.  Ports include one HDMI, three USB, one network connector, an SD reader, and a headphone/microphone combo jack. An optical CD R/W completes the setup.  The shipping was a bit slow for my taste since I wanted it the day before I ordered, but it did arrive in less than a week. The total cost, including taxes and shipping, was $929.00.

     What can I tell you?  This laptop is amazing!  It boots in less than 10 seconds and webpages and programs load quickly.  I never had it so good!  I guess I began to take the wonderful speeds for granted.
     Yesterday, while doing laundry in another part of the house, I decided to open up my 2017 mini-laptop.  The wait was AGONIZING.  Programs, webpages, and documents loaded S-LO-W-L-Y, and I practically locked the machine up by trying to open multiple documents.
     My lesson was learned.  For anyone who is annoyed by slow-to-respond computers, I strongly recommend anything with an SD drive.  The speeds are amazing, and the cost is not unreasonable.  I know I won't take it for granted again.