This morning I spent some time working on my 9-year-old son’s computer. It’s a desktop and it’s been terribly slow since we purchased it last year.

He received the computer as a Christmas gift last year and the machine has generally not been great for the money that we spent on it. It was a fiasco of a Christmas gift purchase. We first ordered a computer in mid-November from Dell and the week before Christmas Dell still hadn’t shipped it. They pushed the ship date back to January so we canceled the order. Purchasing anything the week before Christmas is terrible and the prices were exorbitant. Our son had his hopes set on a computer and we needed to deliver. The PC we purchased was sub-par.

I took advantage of a Black Friday deal and purchased a 500GB Solid State Disk SSD with the intent of replacing his slow mechanical hard drive. If you have a computer with a mechanical hard drive, upgrading to a SSD is likely the best upgrade you can make to prolong the life of the computer. SSD’s reduce boot times.

Without exaggeration, you could go from a 1 minute boot time to a 10 second boot time. This is accomplished because of faster read access of the drive. When the computer starts up portions of the operating system are transferred from the hard drive to the computers RAM. Solid State Disks improve other aspects of a PCs performance but I think you’ll find the boot time one of the main benefits.

How do we tie this into our lives? Like a computer, we all have a boot time. This period is from the minute you wake-up to the point that you are fully ready to function. Let’s speed that up. Here’s how to improve your morning routine.