After about 2 years my PC developed a random fault that was incredibly hard to locate. I must have spent about 4 days on it. In the end I found the M4 was the culprit as it has some kind of intermittent fault that caused my PC to freeze up. The Crucial warranty is 3 yrs so unfortunately I did not have the opportunity to return it in the period available. Bottom line is I could not recommend buying one of these.



I recently purchased a fairly high spec pc with an SSD C drive. Like many others I was impressed and this got me wondering what such a drive would do for my old pc. This is a 2006 AMD dual core 2400hz, 2GB RAM, dual nVidia 7800GT graphics cards in SLI, running XP. I took a chance for £67 and purchased a crucial M4 64GB SSD. I did this almost just out of curiousity. I did a complete re-boot. This involved screwing the 3.5" bay adaptor to the SSD and sliding it in where my old drive used to be. I transferred the SATA and other connection which pull off and push on easily (I am no expert). I then started the pc up with my recovery disc that came with the pc by putting this in the first DVD/ROM drive. It took about 25 mins to load XP, which is very fast in itself. It is worth copying your drivers before you re-boot as otherwise various things like your Ethernet may not work. So after the initial re-boot I had windows working but with no Ethernet. I intalled my Ethernet driver. It took another 30mins to download the 150 ish updates since my rather old version of XP was first issued. I did the recommended updates only, as opposed to the custom ones but you do have to repeat this about 4 or 5 times as each new update triggers another batch of updates, re-starting in between each batch of updates. So what was the result?



Well my old PC would start up in exactly 2 mins 30 secs until fully functional. It now achieves 35 secs. Things like the internet explorer seem far more snappy and instant. Games do not play better or at higher resolution as far as I can tell, there may be a marginal improvement, but they do seem to load up noticably faster, I would estimate at least 3 times. This is providing they are loaded onto the SSD of course.



So if you want to spruce up your old pc this seems to be an excellent option.



If you buy some extra cables you can still use your old drive to take the volume items such as photos, music and the like.



I did not adjust the bios, which I have read elsewhere might be desirable, so it is possible I may not have squeezed all the performance out of the SSD but either way I am very pleased.