Registry cleaner

[the_priest]

www.crucial.com/uk for the SSD hard drive. You can download their version of Acronis for free to clone the laptop over. You will need a usb drive caddy to do that. Prices are now very acceptable and it does make a huge difference to the performance of the system. Just worth doing. I've done several laptops from spinning disk to SSD and it is a big step up. Even better is NVME drives if you have that capability on the system. That is properly quick!

Thanks, I'd been looking at Crucial drives. It's not a brand I know. Also wondering how you go about cloning a non-usb drive so the caddy tip is

I think NVME would be a bit 'new wine in old skins' for this laptop.

I've used Crucial drives for several years now, memory and drives that is. Good quality and warranty. Having the cloning software (load to a USB flash drive 4gb is fine) and boot from that. You then have the new drive in the caddy and clone old drive to that. Be aware that sometimes the old spinning drives don't like being compressed into a smaller capacity drive, so get like for like capacity.

[Count Steer]

www.crucial.com/uk for the SSD hard drive. You can download their version of Acronis for free to clone the laptop over. You will need a usb drive caddy to do that. Prices are now very acceptable and it does make a huge difference to the performance of the system. Just worth doing. I've done several laptops from spinning disk to SSD and it is a big step up. Even better is NVME drives if you have that capability on the system. That is properly quick!

Thanks, I'd been looking at Crucial drives. It's not a brand I know. Also wondering how you go about cloning a non-usb drive so the caddy tip is

I think NVME would be a bit 'new wine in old skins' for this laptop.

I've used Crucial drives for several years now, memory and drives that is. Good quality and warranty. Having the cloning software (load to a USB flash drive 4gb is fine) and boot from that. You then have the new drive in the caddy and clone old drive to that. Be aware that sometimes the old spinning drives don't like being compressed into a smaller capacity drive, so get like for like capacity.

Thanks, at the moment, it's flying (compared to how it was) so I'll enjoy it for a while but I suspect I'll do the Crucial drive/cloning thing after Christmas. Speed is addictive.

(I'm also pleasantly surprised how cheap SSDs are now. (The very first one I heard of was in a computer centre, was quite low capacity and cost £000s!) They've dropped significantly, even in the last 3 years. I reckon you can get 1Tb for what 250Gb cost 3 years ago).

[the_priest]

Yes. I remember when we decided to have our SAN as an SSD setup and we had to put aside 10K for that alone. Nowadays it would be way cheaper. I've shifted all my systems to SSD and have a laptop with NVME which is just silly fast. I can get an even faster NVME drive for it as well if I wanted to, but it is doing everything I require.

[roadster]

Windows 11 professional licence

Why go pro over consumer license?

There are plenty of technical differences but they can be summarized by saying that if you want to get "under the hood" to make your computer behave as you prefer rather than accepting Microsoft's big brother approach then the pro version is better. In any case a pro license costs no more than a home one if you buy the on-line key rather than the retail package.

My own requirements are to have gpedit.msc ( group policy editor ), remote desktop capability throughout my network, local accounts with and without admin rights, no need to run a Microsoft account except when obtaining "apps" from the Microsoft store, unique network configurations etc. etc.

[Count Steer]

Windows 11 professional licence

Why go pro over consumer license?

There are plenty of technical differences but they can be summarized by saying that if you want to get "under the hood" to make your computer behave as you prefer rather than accepting Microsoft's big brother approach then the pro version is better. In any case a pro license costs no more than a home one if you buy the on-line key rather than the retail package.

My own requirements are to have gpedit.msc ( group policy editor ), remote desktop capability throughout my network, local accounts with and without admin rights, no need to run a Microsoft account except when obtaining "apps" from the Microsoft store, unique network configurations etc. etc.

Pretty much my feeling having run Pro and Home in parallel. I feel more in control of the Pro system but MS feels more in control of the Home version. I prefer to do the Sysadmin stuff rather than the software provider.