Long story short:
I'm thinking of swapping out my 1TB 7200 RPM HD for a 500 GB SSD on a hunch that it will fix some problems I'm having.
Long story long:
I have been having some problems with my computer lately. Its a 5-year old dell but its got a i7 chip (2.8GHz) and 8GB ram. I upgraded to Windows 10 a few months ago and it seemed fine; then a month or so ago I started getting this problem where it would take forever (like hours) to turn on and doing simple things like opening task manager would take minutes and most programs wouldn't even open. In task manager I could see that the disk usage was pegged at 100% even though it didn't look like anything was using the drive (save for the occasional hit by system or some Service host.. but those were only using like .1MB/s)
Anyway, after a few days the problem just stopped and all seemed well. I chalked it up to maybe something running in the background like the google drive sync or something -- especially since my wife just dumped like 15 GB worth of photos/videos off her old phone onto the hard drive.
Then last week it happened again. After hours of messing around (mostly just sitting and waiting for things to open) I never really figured out the problem, but I can see that several windows updates have tried to install recently and all have failed. Mid week, things just started working again! So I foolishly went to the windows update screen and tried to re-do the upgrade (a coworker told me that the recent windows 10 updates solved some unrelated problems he'd been having since upgrading). Anyway, as soon as I hit upgrade the disk usage went straight to 100%. Eventually the update failed and by the next day (24 to 36 hours later) my computer was running fine again... as it is right now.
I have no idea whats going on. But a couple people suggested that it could be a hard drive problem and even if its not, upgrading to a solid state drive couldn't hurt. For what its worth, one of the time when everything was FUBAR i rebooted in safe-mode and everything ran fine. That is, until I rebooted again the regular way and it went back to sucking. So I don't know if it is a hard drive problem.
So, do you think its worth it to upgrade? I'm looking at getting this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA4P02CG6252&cm_re=MZ-7KE512BW-_-20-147-361-_-Product (its the same price on Amazon). Space wise it would be a downgrade, but I'm only using about 380GB right now anyway.
I probably wont get it until after Christmas if at all, but trying to think it all through now. Any other thoughts on my problem I'm having?