How to Upgrade HP Pavilion DV6t-7000

[mboy422119]

Hi. This laptop is a bit slow... what are ways for me to upgrade it to a little faster smoother experience? school, work, video editing, audio recording, and video recording through OBS studio are things I am looking to do. I am looking to find ways to make my old laptop a little better...

Please help a noobie out! 🙂

[WAWood]

@mboy422119 

There are really only two upgrades you can make to this laptop: memory and disk.

In terms of memory, different model came with anything from 4GTB to 16GB.  If you have 4GB, you would get some improvement going to 8GB.  Anything more is wasting your money.

In terms of the disk, this model came with over six different kinds of hard drives, most of them 5400RPM (slow), some 7200RPM (fast). Replacing the HDD with an SDD will give the best performance boost, with the 5400RPM model, it will seem like night and day.

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
2) Connect the new drive to the PC using a USB-to-SSD drive adapter (like the one illustrated below)
3) Follow the instructions in this link: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Cloning+a+disk
4) Shutdown the PC when done
5) Swap the drives and reboot the PC.

NOTE: To do this easily, the SDD has to be the same capacity as the HDD.  IF you get an SDD that is a lot smaller, then before you do the cloning, you have to shrink the largest partition on the HDD (usually the OS partition), to the size such that it, and the other partitions, fit easily on the SSD.

You should boot from the new drive without any problems.

Typical USB-to-SSD adapter:

Good Luck