3 quick ways to speed up your old laptop’s storage

If most of your work involves you having to manage documents, edit files, and play around with media, then your laptop should ideally be snappy. If it is not, then trying to open a file takes ages or when you hit print, it just shows a black screen. If you’ve been facing something similar, then it’s a sign of an aging laptop. But worry not, you don’t necessarily need to replace it.

It could be a sign that your laptop’s storage might be the real culprit. And fortunately, there are a few ways to actually speed up your laptop’s storage. Here are three ways to speed up your old laptop’s storage.

Clear some storage space

This is a basic tip, but most people don’t really look at how much they are dumping in their old drive. Since it’s an old storage drive, which is probably an HDD in most cases, keep at least 50GB of free storage space for the laptop to breathe.

If it’s an SSD, then you might think that it’s pretty fast, but you’ll have to check its type. If it’s a SATA SSD, then it’s not as fast as M.2s. Consider replacing your old HDD or SATA SSD with a new M.2 SSD, depending on your laptop’s compatibility.

Update firmware and drivers

Sometimes a bad update might cause your laptop to stutter. In such cases, just head to Settings> Windows Update, and check if there’s a new update available. If there’s a fresh update with bug fixes, immediately update your laptop.

ALSO READ: Laptop running slow? Here’s why it might need a health check-up

Wrong or missing drivers may also turn your relatively old laptop into a vintage machine, so make sure you download all the correct drivers from the manufacturer’s website.

Perform disk cleanup and defragmentation

Windows offers a simple yet effective way of making your storage drive faster. That’s with the disc cleanup option. You can optimise your storage drive and defragment it by heading to Properties > Tools > Optimise. This will clear all the cache and make your drive run almost like new. This is a quick hack to make your laptop’s storage faster.

That’s how you can easily speed up your old laptop’s storage and make it run faster. So, which of these ways helped you speed up your laptop storage? Let us know in the comments below.