How to upgrade your old laptop cheap and in less than an hour

Let me start by saying that my laptop is my entire business. Without it I'm basically out of work. My biggest problem is that buying a new laptop is a huge time investment. I have nearly 100 programs installed on my current laptop and I love the way it's setup. I don't even have the original install files for these programs and even if I did, it would take days or maybe weeks to configure everything and install every component just so I could get my work done right. Not to mention the 40+ VPN connections I have setup for my clients that I would need to figure out again. We're talking weeks and weeks on work. Which is exactly why, my new Lenovo T430 is still in the box two years after purchase and I never stopped using my T420 which I bought nearly 5 or 6 years ago.

When I bought my T420, it was the best money could buy. It had the latest i5 processor, 8GB of Ram and a 128GB SSD (Solid State Drive). I absolutely love my T420. It's still extremely fast; the 9-cell battery lasts about 8 hours of continuous use, and combined with the docking station, gives me exactly what I need in a professional machine. I should add that I also have a 500GB SATA drive in the bay for files, so my 128GB drive is for program installs and the OS only.

So last week, as the used capacity of my 128GB drive was coming to the 95% mark, I ordered a new, bigger SSD drive ($84) and a drive cloning device ($40)

Kingston Digital 240GB SSDNow V300 SATA 3 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive with Adapter (SV300S37A/240G)

Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5 or 3.5in HDD, SSD with Hard Drive Duplicator/Cloner Function [4TB Support] (EC-HDD2)

I simply cloned my smaller 128GB drive into the new 240GB drive using this drive copier in less than 15 minutes. But to my surprise, the new drive is 3.5 times faster than my old drive. The fact that it's also double the capacity for just about $90 is a really great bargain. Especially since this exact byte for byte clone functions exactly as my old drive with all my old programs and settings intact. While I was at it, I upgraded to 12GB of RAM and now my old T420 is screaming fast again with a new lease on life and double the drive space. The cloning device was only $40 and I can use it to make backups of my entire drive each month so I am never at risk of losing my business again. Keep in mind, having backups of my data is not really as relevant for me as having backups of my installed programs and VPN connections so a simple backup drive solution wouldn't work well for me. 

The entire project took me less than 1 hour (after the parts arrived) and cost me about $160 total, $40 of which is the copier device that I can continue to use for backups. Sure beats having to buy a new laptop for $1500+ and spending weeks getting it up to snuff. 

It's worth mentioning that I ran into some issues with partitioning the new drive which I was able to fix with AOMEI Partition Assistant:

http://download.cnet.com/AOMEI-Partition-Assistant-Standard-Edition/3000-2248_4-75118871.html

Also, when I plugged the drive into the old PC alongside the same drive (so both clones were on the same machine) I got a conflict which I resolved by following this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1mQIJJp-bE