FYI - Aspire One AO725 RAM & Samsung 840 SSD Upgrade (Success)

Professor — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 23:54:04 GMT

I had been generally pleased with the performance of the Aspire One 725, however, being the infernal tinkerer I looked into upgrading the system to optimize performance and iron out the multi-tasking blues borne out of the relatively low spec netbook.

Available research into the plan revealed 2 possibilities:

1. HDD to SSD

2. RAM Upgrade

There are loads of internet videos on options/ways to achieve this, but none of them answered the specific questions I had as they pertained to the AO725 (& lack of optical drive for data transfer etc...), so I though I'd share my success with this community.

I replaced the preinstalled 500GB Western Digital HDD with a Samsung 840 500GB SSD and swapped out the 4GB RAM for an 8GB Crucial DDR3 PC 10600 (1333) 204 pin SODIMM.

Samsung 840 500GB SSD

The HDD was easy to replace with the SSD and required use of the plastic drive spacer as the SSD has less depth than the HDD. I had deliberately purchased the complete upgrade kit (MZ-7TD500KW) as I wasn't sure how the process was going to pan out. Basically, would I need the SATA-USB cable?

One of my questions was would I be able to directly reinstall Windows 8 from the USB flash drive I had created with the Acer Recovery Software when I bought the system, or would I have to settle for cloning the drive? In anticipation of the latter option, I downloaded & installed Samsung's Magician & Data Migration software (http://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/MZ-7TD500KW) prior to upgrading and optimized the HDD.

However, upon installing the SSD and booting the AO725 from the USB flash device (BIOS needed to be adjusted to allow this - accessed using the F2 key during POST) I was delighted that the system was easily (& quickly) restored to the SSD. It even re-established the recovery partition, though I'll probably delete this as I have the USB flash drive and original HDD if I ever need to revert. System performance is much improved with this upgrade. The AO725 boots to Windows 8 in less than 35 seconds - at which point it is fully responsive and ready to go. I installed the Samsung Software (which takes care of all the SSD specific settings) and set the SSD to max reliability (as opposed to performance) and achieve read/write speeds of 350/320 MB/s. It is possible that this may be improved by adjusting the settings, but I am satisfied with system performance which is clearly limited by the onboard AMD C-70 CPU.

Crucial 8GB DDR3 1333 204 PIN SODIMM

The RAM upgrade (CT102464BF1339) was achieved physically and technically easily. The BIOS recognized the 8GB SODIMM as did Windows 8. No fuss!

Outcome

The combined results produce a highly responsive and stable system, ideal for the basic tasks I purchased the AO725 for. Applications start immediately and simple multi-tasking is the best I've experienced on a Windows based PC for years. The battery life has been increased from around 4 hours to 4.5 hours on a balanced setting, which is further increased on a power saving mode. The system runs silently aside from the system fan that comes on intermittently with heavy CPU use.

Probably the best & most straight forward upgrade I've ever done - I hope this is of help to any other "infernal tinkerers"!

Addendum:

After a first trim of the SSD (through Samsung software) since OS installation and other system setup, I repotimized the SSD/system by reducing the system page file and acheived read/write speeds of 515/311 MB/s.

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FYI - Aspire One AO725 RAM & Samsung 840 SSD Upgrade (Success)