In our opinion… Windows 10 and above operating systems NEED a SOLID STATE DRIVE to run correctly.
Over the past year, we have seen numerous machines with what we call “high disk usage” think of it as your car racing in the driveway vs. idling. It’s using a whole lot of resources for no darn good reason.
Slowness is the number one complaint from users when this happens. This slowness is because the machine has zero resources left after overcompensating somewhere else. When this happens, the computer has nothing left for the functions you want, so the machine runs at a crawl. Slow to start, slow to find a file or open a program, slow to load email and slow to load internet pages.
Can you find this information available from Microsoft? Why no, you can’t. However, over a years of seeing it, and multiple technicians working it, the solution is the same each time. We may never know exactly what Microsoft has done, but we do know a PC on a mechanical drive runs terribly. And time after time we see switching to an SSD solves the problem. If you feel like looking this up yourself, you will find a good dozen other possible causes. Because we work on so many machines, we can tell you; those fixes don’t necessarily work. When we make an exact copy of your hard drive onto a solid-state drive – the problems all go away WITHOUT changing drivers or anti-virus software or browsers or fetch or any of the other self-help answers out there.
So if you are running an older computer with a mechanical drive, consider an upgrade to a SSD. This fix would be for computers about three years old or older.
All machines we sell now are solid-state drives. (sometimes storage drives are mechanical, which makes correct sense as it’s cheaper and bigger and better with data recovery if needed. The OS is still on the SSD)
Upgrading to a new SSD on a running computer runs around $250 – $300 depending on your particulars.