In article , Bill W
wrote:


At the same time, this laptop is not supported for
anything past Win 7 - no chipset updates at all.

that could be why you are having crashes.

It might also be why I have low read/write speeds - ~250 for each.

250 of what units and what time frame?

MB/s. Isn't Sata 2 limited to 300? I'm assuming that's the issue.

yep, so 250 mbyte/s is reasonable.

and how is the drive connected?

It's a laptop, so there are no options internally.

internal would be sata.

external could be anything.