My awkward, depreciating beast of a gaming laptop from 2009 needed a bit of a pick-me-up - it was bloated full of Steam games and running hot enough to experience random slowdowns.

Though I hesitated for a while to add a premium product to an aging laptop, I figured adding an SSD as a second drive would help address both the storage problem and the heat problem. Any speed benefit would simply be a welcome consequence.

Though I'm a software developer by profession, between work, family and hobbies I don't get a lot of time to tinker with technology. Somehow I got this far without ever having seen an SSD in person. I felt silly walking out of the local PC component store paying $1 per MB until I got home and opened up the box for my Samsung SSD 840. To the eyes of a person who last installed a 3.5" hard drive in his desktop tower, seeing this this rectangular slat as a drive felt like the future.

After the painless drive installation (thanks YouTube and Google), I copied over my Steam folder (a lengthy process due to being limited to SATA II and Valve overselling how well Steam's self-repair of installed games works).

I have to tell you: after getting used to the incessant chirping of an overfilled mechanical hard drive for 3+ years, the complete lack of drive noise when loading and playing TF2 was eerie. Granted, the fans on this monstrosity are still louder than a launch Xbox 360, but they became the only noise. I guess cleaning out half of the primary mechanical hard drive served to silence even it!

I'm pretty excited about my laptop's new lease on life. Less heat, smoother games, quicker loads.

There's only one unfortunate part to this endeavor: now I want to build a desktop out of 100% new parts instead of just making minor tweaks to an obsolete laptop. I'm excited how much computer components have progressed over the past 3-4 years and I want to play with all of those new toys for myself.