If you've ever been anywhere near a conversation talking about how to speed up an old computer or laptop, aside from people telling you to reset windows, the two most common things you'll probably hear are add more RAM and upgrade to an SSD. For this video I'll be investigating how much those two upgrades can actually help an old system. And for that we'll be using an old Core 2G or a laptop from 2007, as well as some RAM, small RAM, a mechanical hard drive and an SSD. The laptop in question is a compact 690P. I've already made a video on it. And with a dual core 2.5 GHz T9300 in its slow state, we've got a single stick with DDR2, 2GB. There's also a 5400 RPM Cgate mechanical hard drive and on that is a fully updated installation of Windows 10. Both the updated and the standard version of the laptops are going to be clean in stores of Windows. They're also going to have steam installed, which will add something to the boot up and will also mean a background programming, which will make it more realistic to a standard user. The test is going to comprise of a start-up race between the two and then we'll also be opening some websites and for doing the sort of average day to day tasks, to see really whether the addition of an SSD and RAM makes much of a difference. Let's begin with the start-up. We've got to make sure we wait for steam to have loaded. I get the idea that my arm is going to hurt by the time this is finished. There we go, is finally ready. After about two minutes, which isn't great. Does it fare any better in loading the internet? In our day-to-day test of the laptop, we only have a word document along with YouTube, Wikipedia and emails open. This is quite reflective of a normal daily usage for the average person and yet if we take out the task manager, the system is already using 80% of our physical memory. Checking down here, you can see we're actually using 2.3 gigabytes altogether, which means some of our RAM is being stored on the hard drive already, which isn't great since we're on a mechanical hard drive. It's going to mean that the data is going to take ages to go from that hard drive to the processor. That's one of the downsides of having a low RAM and a mechanical hard drive when it comes to a data being stored on that drive really slows things down. So what can more RAM and an SSD actually do to your computer? Well, if we start off with RAM, adding more RAM to your system means that you have more of that super fast storage of the data that your processor will use to access whatever you're doing at that moment. For example, if you have two internet tabs open and you're quickly switching between them, all of the data on them will be stored on the RAM, meaning that it's available for basically instant access to you. Or does an SSD do? Well, that's mainly for start-up and opening other apps as well. So because it's quicker than a mechanical hard drive, it means that the data is quickly copied from the storage onto your RAM for then quick use. So if you're using up Windows, quickly into the RAM, if you're opening a word editor for your data, it's quickly sent into your RAM. There's another thing about the RAM as well if you're using two matching specification sticks, then it means that they can work in a dual channel meaning that the bandwidth of data to the processor is effectively twice as much as the RAM works in unison together, which of course means faster, less micro holdups between the RAM and your process, meaning that the system is overall going to be a little bit more responsive. Let's find out now how that affects our upgraded system compared to the system that we've just seen. We now begin the start-up test with four gigabytes of RAM and the Samsung SSD. Due to the facts that we mentioned talked about earlier, you can assume that it should start up at a lot quicker speed. Surprise surprise, it's done in under a minute and a half. Our recreation of day-to-day use is really taking up more RAM than we had access to on the previous setup. This means that for example, YouTube videos are able to buffer more and also the programs can be switched between really quickly. It's clear that this laptop has seen a big speed boost with the upgrade. Well as we've just seen, the mid-test predictions have proved to be correct, loading up windows and loading up any applications were much less of a drag as they were completed quite quickly from using an SSD compared to a mechanical hard drive. Also with the more RAM, it meant the switching between tasks that were already open didn't have any of hold-ups that we saw when on the 2GB test, we were actually using more RAM than we physically had, meaning it was stored on the slower hard drive. With four gigabytes of RAM, remember we even had space to open some extra tasks, maybe you've got a video call in the background, something like that. There's enough RAM even in 2020. If you're going from two gigs to four gigs, you'll definitely notice a difference and also you'll notice a difference with an SSD too. So as it's proven, RAM and an SSD will improve an old system's performance quite well. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did leave a like and also don't forget to subscribe for more videos like this. For now, hopefully I'll see you in another video. Goodbye.