Cofton Computers

12/10/2025

HDDs and SSDs and Windows 10/11

"My computer is running slowly!"
If you have an older Windows10 or 11 PC and it's running slowly, there's one upgrade you can make that should make a big difference.

For some time now, it has been obvious that Microsoft no longer considers (or even cares about) users who still have mechanical Hard Disc Drives (HDDs) when they test Windows updates. Recent Win10 and Win11 builds will not run effectively on mechanical HDDs.

As an example, some years ago I bought a brand new Dell laptop that came with Win10 installed. It ran well, but just a couple of months later and after another update it suddenly seemed to slow down massively. At the time, I believed that this was because of a well-publicised problem where a security hole had been found in the look-ahead functions of the latest Intel processors. Microsoft's reaction to this problem was to simply disable those functions in an update, but that of course slowed down any computers that used those chips. . .

Like many users, I found myself turning off some of Windows' pointless features to try to improve the speed, with minimal gain. It was still painfully slow to boot and I could hear the HDD clicking away all the time, even when I wasn't doing anything with it. Then every weekend, when the updates tended to be installed, it would just grind to a halt. The system would spend pretty much a whole day installing updates, during which time it became unresponsive and unusable for most of that day.

I upgraded the RAM in the laptop to the maximum allowed. That improved overall performance (e.g. opening applications), but it was still grinding to a halt frequently.

By contrast, a much older Dell laptop (which originally ran Vista) ran the same build of Win10 like lightning. Why was this much faster? It should have been slower! Then one day I remembered that I'd replaced the HDD in this old laptop with a Solid State Drive (SSD). I'd completely forgotten that I'd done that!

Suddenly it was clear: Windows10 runs slowly now because it is constantly messing with the HDD contents, even when the system is not being used. You can try disabling the Search Indexer and other suspects, but it won't make much difference. I don't think there's a single culprit; Windows now has a huge posse of background tasks (including several components of the Update system) that are constantly reading and writing to the HDD, and most likely reporting their findings to Microsoft. . .

Therefore I bought a new SATA SSD to replace the original HDD. I cloned the partitions from the HDD to the SSD and fitted the SSD. Bingo!
Suddenly it was much faster to boot, much more responsive to use, and I no longer had "lost days" due to updates being installed.

So, if you have an older PC that still has a HDD for its C: drive, I would recommend upgrading to an SSD. It makes a huge difference.

But there's a caveat. . .

The SSD I bought (purchased directly from a well-established, reputable USA hard drive manufacturer whose HDD products I'd used in PCs and servers for years) suddenly failed a month or two after installing. No warning signs, no clues - it just stopped working. It turned out that the failure mode was the drive switching into a "safe" mode because it detected some error in the storage. But that "safe" mode was not really "safe" because it prevented any access to the contents. Apparently the data recovery firms can only extract data by soldering the SSD board to special circuitry that bypasses the built-in controller. Not something you can do at home!
When a mechanical HDD starts to go wrong, the user gets some warning signs: odd errors, strange sounds from the drive. And data can still often be recovered using software tools, even when the partitions become unusable. With SSDs - forget it!

In my case, the SSD was covered by a warranty, but of course the data on it was not. I could have sent the SSD to a data recovery firm, but the cost would have been very high, and then the SSD manufacturer may not have honoured the warranty because the drive had been dismantled. (There was a process by which the recovery firm could liaise with the manufacturer so as to maintain the warranty, but it was all complicated and risky and I didn't have the time to deal with it.)

A replacement drive arrived in the post, but by this time I'd been reading lots of complaints on the manufacturer's user forum about this particular range of SSDs. Apparently they were gaining notoriety as being completely unreliable. The manufacturer had offered me an upgrade to their next level of SSD and I'd accepted the offer, but when it arrived, it was the same type that I'd had before. I could have returned it, but decided not to waste any more time on the matter.

But after reading even more horrific tales of this model of SSD (and also of another range the manufacturer makes under a different brand name) failing, I decided to remove this new SSD and replace it with an SSD bought from another supplier (this time an established manufacturer that is well known for making memory products - which is effectively what an SSD is). The suspect SSD was kept in a drawer and used only for temporary storage as an external drive. I didn't trust it!
My suspicions were correct. A few months later, I took the SSD out to use it - and it had failed, just like the first one.

I reported this to the manufacturer and they organised another replacement. This time I made sure that they sent me the higher-spec model.
But by now I'd lost all confidence in this company's SSDs (although I still rate their HDDs as being some of the best). So that SSD is not being relied on to do anything critical.

Since then, I have been called out a few times to deal with PCs where SSDs have failed. Increasingly, these are the new M.2 format of SSD (just a tiny circuit board that sits on the motherboard) and these seem to be unreliable.

There are also suggestions that SSDs can fail if they are not powered-up frequently enough to refresh their storage. This implies that using an SSD as backup storage is not a good idea, as the contents can even be lost while the drive is sitting safely in a drawer.

So although I recommend upgrading to an SSD to improve (or restore) performance of a PC, I highly recommend making sure that you have your data backed-up somewhere else, but NOT to another SSD or USB stick - because these can fail just as easily.

I recommend seeking out mechanical HDDs to use for backup. You can still get USB-connected mechanical HDDs, and there are also some useful USB adaptors that allow bare HDDs to be inserted in slots.
If you have a desktop or tower PC with enough SATA ports and physical room, I recommend using a mechanical HDD for additional internal drives for data storage, whilst the boot drive is and SSD. Although HDDs are slower, this isn't such a problem when they are only used for backup or data storage. It's their use as the bootable Operating System partition and the Windows folder that slows the system down.

I also recommend using optical media (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray BDR discs) for long-term and archival storage. Optical media are inherently more stable than magnetic HDDs or SSDs and have been proven to last.

Ideally, your data needs to be stored in three separate places, so a third location could be Cloud storage. Windows10 and 11 offer a limited amount of Onedrive storage for free, and there are many competing Cloud storage services out there.

Note: the photo is NOT of the bad model of SSD, but of one of the reliable devices I have since used.

16/09/2024

New logo!
I've been thinking about designing a proper logo for some time, but couldn't get any inspiration. I wanted something that was relevant to the Cofton Hackett area, but couldn't work out how to incorporate our most famous landmark - the Lickey Hills - into a design.
This design is based on the stone cross design associated with the local landmark St. Michael's Church but made to look like some high-tech computer screen (with a very slight nod to the "Interociter" of "This Island Earth" and the battery guns of "Forbidden Planet").
It'll do for now. . .

04/12/2023

Re-installing an old printer on Windows 10

We'd used an old Lexmark Optra E310 as our main laser printer for - well, decades! It's been quite reliable, so why change it?
It was starting to have paper pick-up problems though. Treating the rubber rollers with AF Platenclene Cleaning Pump Spray helped reduce this, and I'm sure that further treatment would have helped make it even better.
But last year I had the chance to buy a 2nd hand HP M506 for a knock-down price, so I jumped at it. It's very good - much faster than the old E310, with double-sided printing and lots more paper-handling functions. So that became the main printer and the E310 was put into storage for a while.
This week I wanted to lend the E310 to someone, so I fetched it out of storage and tested it. It turned out that I didn't have a driver for it on my main Win10 laptop. This used to have a driver, but that was a few HDD swaps ago.
So I set about installing one. As you might expect, Win10 didn't know anything about this printer, and it wouldn't accept any of the E310 drivers I had.
A quick trawl of the web found the excellent how-to article that I had to use the last time I went through all this:
https://axotron.se/blog/printer-driver-for-lexmark-optra-e310-on-windows-10/

This time however, it didn't work. The article's author had in fact posted several updates, showing that every time Microsoft did a major update for Win10, the printer disappeared and became just that little bit harder to re-install.
One of the comments at the foot of the article linked to a new solution: a Lexmark Universal Driver - designed to work with a wide range of Lexmark printers. You can find this driver here:
https://www.lexmark.com/en_us/support/universal-print-driver.html

So what you have to do is install this driver. Then you have to run through Windows' own manual printer installation process (see the linked article for details), selecting the Lexmark Universal Driver. If it's connected via USB, you may have to try another USB port (mine offered the choice of two).

Save time and money by managing multiple devices with just one driver. Read more about the benefits of our Universal Print Driver, find compatible operating systems, download information, and more.

30/11/2023

Attack of the Clones!

I use Macrium Reflect for cloning my main PC's drives. Many drives come with the option to download and use cloning tools, but so far, for me, Reflect is the only tool that has actually worked 100%. There is a free version of the software - limited to a single PC - which works very well.
Note that some hard drive docking bays being sold these days are also able to clone a drive directly without requiring a PC. The limitation is that they are usually simple "one-touch" systems that will clone an entire drive (all partitions) and will only clone a drive to one of the same, or larger size. So these will not help if you want to clone (say) a 1TB HDD to a faster 250GB SSD.
There IS a way to shrink partitions in Windows 10 though, so if you don't have many files stored on your drive (or are able to move them somewhere else), then it is possible to shrink a partition down to below the size of the destination disk so that a "one-touch" cloner should work.
If I get time between other work, I'll test this out. . .

14/07/2023

Attention authors and content creators!
Would you like your content proofread for just £10 per hour?

In addition to supplying IT services, I also work as a proofreader.
In the past I have dealt with documents ranging from product packaging and flyers to complete books.
Sometimes this work goes well beyond the remit of a proofreader, including editing and document layout. For example, I have worked with an engineering company to make multi-author reports and proposals more coherent and consistent (standardising terminology and ensuring a consistent author's "voice").
Due to a change in my personal circumstances (I'm now a single parent with a school run to deal with), I find myself in need of more proofreading work, as this can be done from home more easily.
To stimulate interest, I have lowered my proofreading rates to just £10 an hour for a limited time. That's below minimum wage!
I'm doing this because I'd rather work at home doing the job I love for minimum wage than go out and stack shelves or flip burgers for just a little more.
So if you have a document that needs checking, this is your chance!
Novels, non-fiction books, pamphlets, flyers, web sites, ebooks, manuals, instructions, posters - you name it, I can do it.
I can also help with editing and other documentation issues (if using MS Word), such as formatting, layout, references, captions, tables.
So if you have a project that needs checking for spelling, grammar and style, give me a try. I can proofread a small sample section of your work for free to give you confidence in my abilities.
Or if you know of anyone else who could use my services, please share this post.

14/07/2023

I don't normally deal with iPhones, Android phones, tablets or iPads, but this week I went outside of my Windows PC comfort zone to try to sort out a problem with a customer's email, which was needed to be accessed on both an Android phone and an iPad. The Android was OK, but the (newly reset) iPad was not allowing connection to the mailbox.
To add to my discomfort, it was a Gmail account and Google has some strange ways of dealing with logging-in issues. Google wouldn't accept the (supposedly correct) password on the iPad's mail app, so we used the Forgot Password option. I expected it to send a validation email to the mailbox which could be read on the Android mail app, but instead it sent a notification directly to the OS of the Android device, with a number to be typed into the iPad. Except that there was no such notification. . .
To cut a long story short, I found that if I did a couple of resends of this notification, it suddenly worked - the notifications now popped up on the device. No idea why! Then it appeared to need multiple notification cycles to convince Google that it was genuine. The strange thing is that although it then said we could type in a new password, it didn't give an option for doing that.
So - job done. But what a palaver! And I'm not happy about having less control over how to connect to a mailbox.
I'm a Windows guy, but the world is moving away from Windows and PCs. (And Windows is getting worse with each new version and update.) So it's time to do some research and testing and begin to understand these annoying little gadgets that everyone uses these days.

20/06/2023

Hi everyone. If you've wondered why my page has been devoid of activity for some time, it's because I've had a major illness (and death) in my close family to deal with. Now I'm picking up the pieces, and hope to return to full-time operations again fairly soon. So watch this space for more news, reviews, opinions and tips.

28/04/2021

I've recently been testing and re-installing the OS on some old Toshiba laptops. Getting support, drivers and other info from Toshiba was always a problem (compared to Dell, for example), even when I worked for a company that bought them by the truckload. These days the process has been made a lot harder thanks to the Toshiba laptop interests being floated off to a company called Dynabook.
Try doing a web search for "Toshiba drivers" and - in addition to all those 3rd party driver sites that I wouldn't touch with a bargepole - you'll see several hits for various Dynabook support sites. However, it's very unclear which is the correct site to be on for UK customers. The promising-looking https://support.dynabook.com/uk is definitely NOT for UK users: try typing in the serial number for a UK-bought Toshiba and it will complain "Your entry doesn’t appear to be valid. Please double-check that your product is from the Americas, Australia or New Zealand region and try again."

I tried various different URLS for Dynabook support sites, and was about to give up when I found this one:
https://uk.dynabook.com/support

This one works! The driver search engine does not perform as well as it did in the old Toshiba days (it finds multiple instances of the same drivers), but at least it gets you there.
So if you have an old Tosh that you want to re-use, now you know where to go.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to browse without changing your settings, we’ll assume that you’re happy to receive all the cookies on this dynabook website. You can also click the “Continue” button to accept our policy in your br...

24/02/2021

If you're into art, photography and document design, you'll no doubt be familiar with the Adobe Creative Suite / Creative Cloud suites of software (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat and others), which for decades have been the industry-standards for digital artwork.
But there's a new player - a UK-based software house (owned by Serif) - that's starting to make a name for itself in the digital art world: Affinity.
Affinity provides equivalents to the Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign triumvirate. They are significantly cheaper than Adobe's products and can be bought outright - whereas the only way to buy a current Adobe tool is through their Creative Cloud subscription service.
My partner now uses Affinity alongside Adobe tools, and finds them quite useable and interesting - although major differences in the user interface and tool functions are making it a steep learning curve.
Affinity are currently doing a 50% off deal during the pandemic, and are offering a free 90-day trial as well. So now's the time to find out if this software is as good as its reputation. I'll be testing it out over the next few weeks (workload permitting), and will report back with my findings. . .

From the smoothest, fastest photo editing and graphic design software to the most powerful publishing software, Affinity apps are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with creative technology.