On Thu, 21 Dec 2017 22:38:20 -0500, nospam<nospam@nospam.invalid>
wrote:

>In article<futo3d997kdia8chdhgo8ll9cqn5pkd8bh@4ax.com>, Bill W
><nothing@nowhere.com> wrote:
>
>> >> As I understand it, 
>> >
>> >you don't.
>> 
>> >>   ...it should only take seconds to boot.
>> >
>> >unless the drive is defective, which given his description, is what the
>> >problem is.
>> 
>> Well I did what any reasonable person would not do, and continued with
>> the science experiment. I downloaded some free SMART reading software,
>> and there are 30 current pending sectors. Googling that, what seemed
>> to appear in every result was "replace the drive now". So I guess I
>> will.
>
>exactly as i suspected.
>
>for smart testing, this is among the best, and even supports smart over
>usb (with compatible bridges):
><https://www.smartmontools.org>

I'll grab that one, too.

>> Getting back on-topic, SSD's and more memory to help with photo
>> editing have been discussed many times on this group. LR is very slow
>> on this laptop when doing demanding tasks, such as spot removal when
>> the "spot" is very big. I'm maxed out at 8 GB memory, and I was going
>> to find out just how much difference the SSD would make, and then post
>> the results here. It should be of some interest to some people. If it
>> will rejuvenate an old laptop, people can save money considering the
>> low prices of the drives these days. 
>
>an ssd can make a *huge* difference in performance, even though it's
>still bottlenecked by sata.
>
>also keep in mind that depending on the sata controller in the system,
>some ssds may not negotiate the fastest possible speeds.

That's my main concern. There are no updates for the hardware that I
can find. In fact, Toshiba doesn't even support the laptop for Win
8.1, much less 10, so it is dated, even though it came with Win 7
installed. Which brings up another concern - when I installed 10
anyway, I spent a lot of time finding drivers to get things working
again. It might be different with the most recent versions of 10,
though.