How to speed up computer with second hard drive added?
March 9th, 2010
I pulled a hard drive out of my laptop and put it in my desktop, it’s got 320 GB and is 87% free (compared to my desktop – 87GB and 60% full) with a windows operating system. The HD I just put in has windows vista on it (I’m strange I liked vista better than XP) but would like to speed up my system using the additional HD or run Vista off it. Any steps I would take to do either of those?
Thanks in advance!
You can’t just take a running system from one computer and plug it into another. The hardware is way different, and the drivers are the wrong ones, especially if moving a laptop drive to a desktop (or vise versa)
You basically have to re-install the version of windows you want, so it detects the proper hardware. This is especially true is going from a multi-processor (dual core) to a single processor or vise-versa – it will fail.
An extra hard drive won’t speed up your PC no matter what you do.
How ‘fast’ your computer works is dependent upon the CPU, the amount of RAM, the type of RAM, and the amount of software running including the Windows version.
The only way to run an operating system installed on an additional hard drive is if you have your machine configured for “dual boot” or “multi boot” capability. That is doable, but not exactly easy to set up.
I’m pretty sure that you won’t be able to boot from the laptop disk even if you do set up dual boot capability since that HD was configured for a completely different computer and the settings will probably be incompatible with your desktop pc. It is configured with hardware drivers that won’t work on your desktop.
About the only thing you can do is install the laptop disk as a secondary (slave) hard drive which simply provides you with more space, but you won’t be able to run any of the programs that were installed on it.
If you feel your computer is running slow, I’d recommend you use some programs like Ad-Aware or Spybot to clean up any spyware or malware that may be bogging down your system.
Good Luck!