Would I see a speed increase with a SSD drive?

[Denis54]

I am a light user. I am retired and I use my computer 2 - 4 hours a day mostly to surf the web. I also use Excel, Word and Outlook. I would like my computer to be faster.

My present computer is as follows: E4300 C2D (@3.0), ASUS P5B-Plus, 2 X 1 GB Corsair memory, 500 GB WD Caviar Black, Win 7.

Would I see a significant speed increase with a SSD drive?

Which drive should I get? I do not need a large drive.

I would install Win 7, Office, Norton and the files I use the most often on the new drive and leave most of my other files on my existing files. Presently I use less than 60 GB on my existing drive.

[Arinoth]

The only signficant speed increase you would see is your computer taking less time to boot up. Other then that what you say you use your computer for are relatively light and quick applications to load/run and wouldnt see that much of a benefit with an ssd.

[Zero82z]

What exactly is slow about your computer? The components you have are plenty fast for a machine used for light tasks like those.

[Scottyboy85]

norton is the devil

[Denis54]

Nothing is slow about my computer. I just wish it was faster.

[Zero82z]

But faster in what aspects? When performing what tasks? What is taking longer right now that you would like to take less time?

[poohbear]

OP maybe u just need to reinstall windows? That usually speeds things up fo rme if its been a long time. things would be snappier to open ofcourse w/ a SSD, but a bit of overkill for what u use it for.

[phoenixrage]

yea, i switched to SSD, and windows and programs installed on the SSD load up a lot faster. But I made a big jump from an E6600 w/ 2GB RAM to an i7 930 w/ 6GB RAM. So it was a huge jump in all aspects.

Loading drivers, rebooting and such are def. faster.

[frontier204]

How about defragging your hard drive? +1 to Arinoth in that I agree that the SSD won't help in anything other than boot time.
Windows 7's superfetch should preload the programs you use into RAM, so your browser and MS Office programs should all start up in less than 3 seconds, if that.
You can also try "msconfig" and see if you can disable any programs at startup that you don't need (e.g. Adobe Reader "speed launch").

[MpG]

More RAM would give superfetch more memory to work with, might improve things for you some. And as said, make sure you defragment the hard drive periodically, as that can slow things down over time too.