A very quick way to significantly boost performance on that old laptop

Have an old laptop? Before you throw it away, consider upgrading the hard drive to breathe some new life into that aging machine!

Here's a very quick way to significantly boost performance on your old laptop: upgrade to an SSD (solid state drive). Chances are, your laptop has a traditional spinning hard drive. Maybe you can even hear it when it's "thinking." Upgrading to an SSD can result in a significant performance boost, especially if you get an SSD made by a reputable company. Avoid getting an SSD on eBay from a no-name company.

If your laptop is really old, then you're probably going to need a 2.5" hard drive with an IDE or PATA connector. If you purchased your laptop within the last 3-4 years or so, then it probably uses a SATA connector.

I recently upgraded a few different laptop hard drives to an SSD and found amazing performance improvements ranging from quick start-up boot times and very efficient multi-tasking. You can now get decent SSDs for laptops for less than $150. You can get away with a 128 GB drive if you're running Windows XP, Vista, or 7.