Larc wrote:
I recently replaced my antique Toshiba laptop with a new shiny new HP, which I freely
admit is at least partly a toy since I'm retired and do my real work on a PC. The
new laptop arrived with a 1TB 5400 RPM HDD. I added a 250GB NVMe SSD to use for the
system drive and set up 2 partitions on the HDD, E: for working data and F: for
storage and backups. I'm planning to replace a memory module and go from 12GB to
16GB total (not much difference, but I'm prejudiced against uneven modules in twin
slots). While I have the laptop open, I could change the current HDD to something
else like a 7200 RPM HDD or preferably a SATA SSD. But my thinking is that I'd not
notice much difference in day-to-day operations since the system drive wouldn't be
affected. System backups would probably go noticeably quicker getting sent to SSD,
but no real need to upgrade unless there are obvious improvements beyond that. Is
there some aspect I'm missing here that might justify an upgrade? Please! I can't
come up with anything no matter how hard I try.

Larc

The main improvement from replacing 1TB 5400RPM with 1TB SSD,
would be shock resistance. But you are probably not a teenager
with the laptop in your backpack while you ride a bike. And
the odds of the laptop receiving a blow while being transported
are low. And besides, to hurt the 1TB 5400RPM hard drive
while it's protected inside the laptop, the laptop would
practically have to be destroyed to ruin that drive.

If the hard drive is for backups, you're probably running
a good mix right there. While real backups would reside in
an external backup device, temporary backups of the 256GB NVMe
would be OK there.

There are backups for device fragility reasons (NVMe goes nuts
and erases files). A real plan would be a "Disaster Recovery Plan".
For example, my old employer kept our backups... in another country.
That gives earthquake protection (even though a 5.0 is more our style here).

Changing the RAM config, that depends on whether the CPU is
single channel or dual channel. With dual channel, a pair of 8GB
would work good. If it's single channel, there's no reason to
be changing a thing. You can look up the processor on Ark.intel.com
or cpu-world.com and try and get more information about it.
Applications like CPU-Z can give you some info to start with.

https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

"zip english 32 or 64-bit version" === portable version ?

Paul