Is this a waste of time?

[blanco]

Thanks guys for your comments - all understood.
Decided out of curiousity to get a 250GB SSD (on it's way) for £30.
Will clone the Hdd and do a swap. The subject PC is lightly used by
the owner for word processor/print, docs, pictures etc and very little
on-line activity, so he is not looking for or expecting a large improvement,
just a quicker response to his input. He will not be paying for my time
and I will pay for the new SSD. Doing this as a favour for an old friend.
I can use the SSD for myself if it provides no improvement on his old
PC, so I see it as a worthwhile exercise. Gives me something useful to do
during CoVid lockdown and keeps my old brain active.

[CliveM]

Be sure to report back and let us know how it goes.

[wainuitech]

What you can also do, and I've posted this several times over the years - Disable everything not needed, this also speeds up any PC.

Go into Settings - privacy - General (opening Window) under "Change privacy options" 1st turn off the 4 sliders. Then On the Left scroll down to "Background Apps" Turn them all off.

Next Back at settings -- System - (on left) Notifications & Actions - Turn off.

On rebooting it may take slightly longer by a few seconds the 1st boot as windows figures out its not running all those apps in the background, but after that the speed will increase as less usage of resources.

[blanco]

Thanks for advice Wanui. Done all I can so far to optimise. SSD arrived today
and I am now at 50% of cloning with Macrium Reflect. Looking forward to the
stripdown tomorrow to get at the internal HDD contained in the monitor casing.
Could be a bit challenging but I managed to find online a service manual for it.
Will let you know Clive.

[feersumendjinn]

Good luck!
I imagine those all-in-ones would be similar to a laptop, to disassemble.

[dugimodo]

Last all in one I swapped a SSD into needed an offset adapter bracket I couldn't find at the time because it had a 3.5" drive and no 2.5" mounting options and normal adapters don't keep the connector aligned. Easily solved by plugging it in and duct taping the SSD in place.
Ran much better too, duct tape really does fix everything

[wainuitech]

Last all in one I swapped a SSD into needed an offset adapter bracket I couldn't find at the time because it had a 3.5" drive and no 2.5" mounting options and normal adapters don't keep the connector aligned. Easily solved by plugging it in and duct taping the SSD in place.
Ran much better too, duct tape really does fix everything

I remove the Original 3.5" mount and use Heavy Duty Sticky backed velco Tape, works a treat, drive can be easily removed if needed but basically as strong as A Screw Secured Mount.

[blanco]

Easy stripdown and reassemble but the SSD clone failed to bootup. In BIOS, the new drive was shown
as first device in Boot Menu but getting 'no operating system found' on every boot attempt, so I assumed
a failure in cloning operation. However, when I booted from a Macrium rescue boot disc the issue was fixed
and it restored a normal bootup. Not sure if it was all worthwhile as the performance improvement is not
that much. System still has the limitations of the 1.6GHz CPU and the single channel 2GB RAM maximum.
No point in persuing it further.
Three cheers for Macrium; Hip Hip------.

[CliveM]

If nothing else it would seem to have been a good learning experience. Pleased you got it all done ok.