Rant: I called SSD upgrades a waste of money for small clients and had to eat my words after 6 months | Computer Technicians - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals
Rant: I called SSD upgrades a waste of money for small clients and had to eat my words after 6 months
Back when SATA drives were cheap and a fresh install fixed everything, I used to talk people out of buying an SSD because the speed bump felt like hype. Then a dentist in Kenosha with a 2012 Dell kept calling me every 3 weeks about Outlook hanging, and I finally threw in a $60 256GB drive just to get him off my back. Boot time went from about 4 minutes to 20 seconds and he stopped calling me completely, which honestly cost me my easiest repeat visit. Now I keep a stack of cheap drives on the shelf and offer the swap to anybody on a platter disk, because the labor is the same and the look on their face is worth it. What is your cutoff for telling a client their machine is too old for an upgrade?
That dentist story hits home. I did the same thing for years, talking people out of it because the old drives worked fine. Then a bookkeeper with QuickBooks on a 5400 rpm drive made me look like a hero for 60 bucks. The line for me is around 8 years old plus 4GB of RAM. Past that, the drive helps but the whole box is still slow, and they come back mad. If it is a laptop with a soldered drive or a Pentium with 2GB, I tell them to put the money toward a used business machine instead.