If you want an old laptop or desktop to feel like a new machine an SSD drive will probably be the most noticeable upgrade you can make. The price per GB of SSD drives keeps dropping and now Amazon has the OCZ 512GB Agility 4 SSD on sale for $299. That’s about 58 cents a GB.

I jumped in on this drive earlier and had a few issues installing the SSD in my desktop editing bay. After beating my head against the wall for a few weeks I finally solved the problem. It turns out that even though the OCZ toolbox firmware update utility for the drive said i was running the latest firmware, the drive was actually running the beta release firmware (1.4). When I started to go a little crazy over the whole problem, I decided to download the bootable firmware update tool. As soon as it found the drive it registered the old firmware, I updated it to 1.5.2 and all of my problems went away.

So if you do decide to upgrade to the OCZ 512GB Agility 4 SSD, make sure the first thing you do before you use the drive for anything else is update the SSD firmware. Or you’ll end up like me with 7 nights of headache I’ll never get back. Now that it’s running with a clean install of windows 7, my boot times are as fast as they were on the Crucial 512GD SSD I was using. I think that drive will be moved to the laptop and my old 128GB drive will end up under the television. One big happy SSD family.


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