I had a lot of problems these past few days with a couple of games I was playing. Games these days are 3+ gigabytes each! And I had to uninstall and reinstall a few games around 3 times each and a few other apps that had become buggy.

Initial diagnosis

Turns out, you can't do that if you have an HDD. While my PC was not very good, it was also not terrible. Things worked decently enough, and I didn't want to change it. But the good things weren't lasting, and stuff was breaking, so I did what I had to do and reinstalled the buggy apps. Suddenly, after a couple of days of doing maintenance, I noticed a terrible slowness.

I opened up the task manager and realized that the spikes of slowness coincided perfectly with a rise in usage of the HDD. Whoops! I had broken it, hahaha. I foresaw my future. It would get slower, I would complain about having a terrible computer, I'd be depressed... I wasn't going to have any of that.

Home delivered SSD: woot!?

So I bought the new SSD over the Internet. Something brilliant about this quarantine is that businesses have started to understand the importance of online sales and home delivery. This was extremely lacking in Venezuela before 2020, but now anything can be delivered, even an SSD.

I paid it and, in 3 hours, a biker was calling, I came out, and I had a new SSD! I opened up my computer, cleaned it (so dusty inside! I'm so thankful for vacuum cleaners), unplugged the DVD unit (who needs that anyway), plugged in the SSD with those SATA pluggies (I learned today that the DVD unit uses the same plugs as an HDD and an SSD!), turned on my computer, installed Win10 (took just a few minutes), turned it on, and boom! A super-fast computer, as if it were brand new.

Amazing improvements

I had heard that it really sped up a computer to have an SSD. I thought it would be a little, maybe a 100% increase, it would just be less sluggish and more manageable! But no, my PC now has an instant start menu. It takes a few dozen seconds to turn on (made slower by the fact that I have to select one among the two hard drives, and one among the two windows installations). Programs now install super fast and open instantly; performance is the best I've ever had.

I was expecting a lot of improvement and was still surprised. I can't play big games, though; it's not physically feasible. This computer is ancient, assembled from old, used parts, and there are a lot of parts that it simply doesn't have (GPU, decentish graphic card, microphone plug, v3 USB plugs, and I figure there's stuff it lacks that I can't tell because I'm not knowledgeable enough).

Maybeplans for the maybefuture

Maybe in a couple of years, I'll have made enough money to buy a computer that runs Age of Empires: Definitive Edition (tried with this one, and it's slooowwww; maybe I'll try again with the SSD, but I doubt it'll make a difference). I tried AoE HD, and the default settings are super slow too, had to put it on minimum. League of Legends also has to be run on minimum specs(just tried a match), etc.

This SSD is 480 GB, so I'm guessing that I'll have to make use of the cloud for most of my content (Spotify music, Dropbox/Telegram for photos and videos, etc.) I've been exploring these things a lot. I want to use my SSD almost strictly for apps and maybe download a few movies, but I'll have to delete them soon after watching them. Don't want them cluttering up my new environment!