Computer Upgrades
My primary desktop computer that I use every single day is now about five years old. It is still a powerful computer even by today's standards but it needed some preventative maintenance as well as a few upgrades. Five years of daily use is a long time.
The primary issue that needed to be resolved is that my C: drive was almost full. It was so full that just browsing the internet for a few days would collect enough temporary files that my C: drive would move into the red warning area (less than 10gb's left). It is very disconcerting seeing that red drive notice whenever I opened File Explorer so I needed to resolve this problem before I had a bigger problem.
Over the years, I've downloaded and installed so many programs that this smallish SSD was almost completely full. I also had some typical bloat from many Windows Updates as well as bloat from various program updates and such. Getting rid of the bloat would be a good thing.
The hard drive that shipped with this relatively powerful Lenovo desktop graphics computer was a very fast M2 NVME SSD but it was only 256gb's in size. Windows alone ate up a sizeable portion of that small drive. I needed to clone this main C: drive (my Windows bootable drive) to a larger M2 NVME SSD and then physically swap the drives in the desktop tower. I ordered a 512gb M2 NVME SSD and an adapter so I could connect using USB for the cloning prior to physically swapping the drives. These M2 NVME SSDs are tiny and extremely fast. They don't even resemble a traditional hard drive. They resemble a small memory card for RAM.
While I waited for the parts to arrive, I decided this would be a good time to clean up the C: drive before cloning it all.
I thought about it for a few hours before deciding to just do a system restore of Windows. My C: drive only contains Windows, programs and apps. All of these things are available online. All of my data files (documents, photos, videos, music, recordings, etc), which are not available online, are stored on a different drive and backed up daily on yet another drive. Since Windows as well as all of my programs and apps are available online, I chose to simply restore my Windows drive and wipe off all the programs and apps. Then I would reinstall those programs and apps. I knew this would rid my drive of a lot of bloat.
Before wiping the drive and starting over, I knew I needed to save all my email in Thunderbird to another drive. I also wanted to save my desktop backgrounds and some plugins that were stored on this C: drive. Wiping the drive and restoring Windows only required about an hour of time (thanks to the fast M2 NVME SSD and a very high speed internet connection). The next day was spent downloading and installing all my programs and apps. The hardest and most time consuming part was dealing with registration codes for each of these programs. During this reinstallation process, I decided to upgrade a few programs while I was installing everything again anyway.
For some reason, I always have great difficulty migrating my email accounts and all of my email to a different drive. I wasted about two hours trying to get that to work but it appears as though I didn't lose a single email nor did I need to set up my three email accounts again because I managed to get everything to migrate to the new drive. It was a struggle but I got it to work.
Unfortunately, and as is always the case for me when trying to migrate email clients and settings, the email migration process did not work the way the directions advised. I had to go into the files manually to figure out the problem and resolve it myself. After this little hiccup, the rest of the reinstallation process for all my programs and apps went well.
When the larger capacity new M2 NVME SSD arrived, I connected it to a USB 3.0 adapter and quickly cloned my C: drive to it. Opening the desktop tower and swapping the drives was a piece of cake. Just restoring Windows and reinstalling all my programs and apps saved me about 100gb's of space. I opted to not install some stuff I hadn't used so that helped to free up space too. Then again, I also installed some other programs. Since I doubled the size of my C: drive and removed all the bloat, I now have a very fast and mostly empty C: drive so that is good!
In the above photo, this small SSD card is shown. It sits right below the large graphics card with slips into the slot right above the SSD. My graphics card is a double width card so it is quite large and it covers the SSD so the graphics card needed to be removed to access the SSD. Fortunately, my Lenovo desktop has a very user-friendly case. It is a mostly tool-less case with very easy access.
After replacing the primary SSD in which my C: drive resides, I wanted to do something with my clunky old data drive where I save all my documents, photos, videos, music, etc (ie, all the data that I create). This desktop computer came with an old-type spinning 1tb HDD D: drive already installed which is very slow and clunky by today's standards. I had a 1tb SSD sitting around doing nothing so I decided to install that into this computer. This SSD is about five times faster than the stock HDD so that was a nice upgrade.
Right now as I am typing this, the D: drive and the P: drive are mirrored. I'm going to reformat that D: drive though after I ensure that no files were lost when mirroring the two drives. That D: drive is the old spinning HDD that is slow and a type of hard drive that is prone to fail after three to five years. We're at the five year point now so it was time to replace it before it failed. Fortunately, I had a 1tb SSD on hand already sitting around collecting dust so I used that.
So, that was this week's project. It all went surprisingly smoothly and my computer is very fast and responsive just like new. It is really nice to see that my drives are mostly empty. Before this week, two of those drives were almost full and one was in the red! Plus, in this process, I upgraded some software packages and that is always a good thing!
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