Revitalising a Dell Latitude E5410 with an SSD

I have had my Latitude E5410 for a few months and I love it. It's a real workhorse and despite its age it performs amazingly. It's an i5 2.4Ghz machine with 8GB DDR3 and Intel HD Graphics.

However, the ageing hard drive is its only downside. Boot times were very slow and apps could be a bit sluggish to open. I think I noticed this more as my previous computer was a MacBook Air with an SSD.

So I bit the bullet after weeks of deliberation and ordered an SSD. The original 5400rpm Western Digital Blue 320GB SATA hard drive was to be replaced with a Kingston A400 240GB SATA SSD.

The thing I love about this Latitude is its ease of upgradability. Simply pop the bottom off and you have access to the RAM and hard drive. A few screws hold in the drive caddy and a further two screws attach the drive to the caddy. Swapping them over was easy and within 5 minutes the SSD was installed.

Next step was to reinstall Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon 64-bit. I have my trusty USB stick, so installing was easy. I can't say if this was any quicker because I was downloading multimedia codecs at the same time.

However, once installed there was an instantly noticeable speed increase across the whole machine. The next task was to put back all my apps – via Synaptic Package Manager – and it stormed through them. System updates were next and then a few apps that needed to be found online (such as Chrome, Reaper and Geekbench).

Before removing the older hard drive, I did some timed tests to see if this SSD upgrade would make the huge improvement that everyone had said would happen. I then redid those tests with the SSD installed.

As you can see from the table below the upgrade did the trick. Boot time went from a rather slow 150 seconds down to 37 seconds, and apps opening time have halved.

The whole machine feels so much snappier. An added bonus is the laptop is whisper quiet, with the SSD it makes no noise except the occasional whirr of the system fan.

I am extremely happy. It has breathed new life in to my beloved Latitude E5410. Its a chunky machine that I was very happy with and now I am super impressed with the upgrade.

I now have a spare 320GB hard drive that I am not sure what to do with. I could replace the internal DVD-RW in this Dell with it via a converter caddy giving me two internal drives, but I do like having an optical drive even if it only used occasionally.

Written by Simon Royal. Follow me at twitter.com/simonroyal

Further reading:

17/11/2020 - Revitalising a Dell Latitude E6500 with an SSD

Revitalising a Dell Latitude E6500 with an SSD

I have been playing about with a Lenovo ThinkPad W500 I was given awhile back, but I'm tired of it suddenly deciding to use the dead ATI graphics card every now and then. It's a real faff to get it going again and I really wanted a reliable Linux laptop to hand. I was going to put an SSD in it, but decided my Dell Latitude E6500 would be a better place for it, it's much more reliable, and I actually prefer the keyboard on the Dell. I have had it for a long time, but it has been set aside as a spare laptop for ages since I tend to use my Acer Chromebook 14 for general browsing the net while sat on the sofa. Sometimes there's one or two things that are not easily done on a Chromebook, so it will come in handy to have the Dell to hand. It has a P8600 (2.4Ghz) Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM, Intel GM45 graphics and came with a 120GB hard drive.

I received a Kingston SSDNow A400 240GB SATA 3 Solid State Drive for my birthday and decided to put that in the Dell to pep it up a bit, particularly to make it boot faster. It's also actually twice the size of the Seagate Momentus 5400RPM hard drive that was in it, which I think was probably the drive it came with from new. I would like to up the RAM to the maximum 8GB but it would cost £30 for 2x 4GB sticks of DDR2. It's a shame it's DDR2 as if it was DDR3 I could've taken the RAM from the Thinkpad, and a DVD writer would be nice in it to replace the combi drive...but I digress...

  

On the first try, the rear set of mounting screws would not go in, but the drive fitted in. However on boot, it was not detected by the Latitude. So I popped it out and put it back in without the front cover and it went right in. The rear screws went in fine but the front ones did not... 

After some Googling and head scratching, I discovered that since the SSD is thinner, you need put a shim under the drive to make the connectors and screw holes meet inside. I cut and folded some of the thick card from the packaging and used that. The drive now fit snugly and the outer cover is on. Sorted!

I used to run Kubuntu on the Latitude but these days I prefer KDE Neon, as it has a much newer version of KDE, which is much more usable. After a quick fresh install on the SSD, I rebooted and found the boot time is much quicker than before and the desktop is very snappy. It boots in around 15 seconds and shuts down in 4 seconds. Boot time with its original old hard drive was a lot longer! 

All i needed to do then was install all my favourite apps and tweak the desktop to my liking. Desktop apps like Chrome start quicker too. It's a night and day difference in performance! I am really glad I upgraded the Latitude to an SSD and I'd like to upgrade some of my other laptops too. The old hard drive will go on the spares pile. Adding an SSD really is a great way to bring these old laptops a new lease of life. Next in line for the SSD treatment might be my old white Macbook...

Further reading:

01/07/2020 - Resurrecting My Lenovo ThinkPad W500

An SSD replacement brought my HP Chromebook 14 back from the dead.

Just recently my first gen HP Chromebook 14 started crashing and rebooting randomly, and almost exactly 2 years after I received the device new, the 16GB SSD inside completely died. Unlike the new Macbook Pro, or quite a few Chromebooks, the SSD is actually replaceable. With a little Googling I found a useful blogpost on how to replace it. Instead of going the whole hog and plumping for a 128GB drive, I went for a 32GB SSD due to budget constraints and the worry that it might play up again.

Pulling the Chromebook apart was quite a delicate job, and I am not really keen on doing it on laptops, but it went OK. I even tried re-seating the display cable to fix the flickering I have been getting recently. I put it all back together but had take it apart again because the SD card reader's catch stopped working, the card would not stay in, so I had to put the springiness back into that. Also there's a screw left over...there's always one! Then it was a case of inserting the recovery SD card to restore ChromeOS. It is good to get it going again after having to use my old heavy Dell Latitude E6500 (with Kubuntu) instead for a week or so. I missed the near instant response a Chromebook has when you want to quickly jump on the net, and the hassle-free updates and ultra quick boot time. It's nice to have a little extra onboard storage space and I just hope this SSD lasts longer than 2 years as I really do not like opening this thing up! It's also good to know that the battery is also easily replaceable too.