A week ago I swapped my four-year-old laptop for a brand new one.  It only cost $500 and I now have the fastest, coolest laptop on the planet, basically it’s a rocket ship.  How was this possible?

I replaced the hard drive in my four-year-old laptop with a solid state drive.  1TB for $500.  And now it flies.

This was amazing but actually not surprising, since Windows Paging is so crummy.  Now that physical memory once again exceeds logical memory, you can run lots of stuff but you can't do it without paging.  The best solution is a really fast disk.  And eliminating seek time and rotational latency altogether means faster is blazingly faster.

So if you have an old laptop which could use a little speed boost, consider an SSD.  Try it, you'll like it :)

PS for you Mac people, OS X is better at paging than Windows but the speedup will still be dramatic