Good day, I hope you guys are doing well.

Although I said I would wait until my exams ended before getting a new harddrive, I really couldn't hold back and ended up getting it. Unfortunately for me things went to shit fairly quickly.

First off the new harddrive had windows crash on it in less than a day after getting installed. I ended up having to format it and reinstall windows but now I have an even bigger problem than before.

My Koikatsu studio and chara maker have become slow, like 0.5 to 1.5 FPS slow. This means that setting up scenes or trying to make video renders is close to impossible right now.

 I've had a few nice people from the Koikatsu discord server suggest various ways to try and fix this but nothing has worked so far and right now there's 3 paths this can go through. 

The first and most hopeful is that all these problems are being caused by the new harddrive which is a pretty weak HDD and switching to an SSD will fix the problem. This would be pretty expensive for me but if I withdraw my patreon earnings for this month instead of chucking it in my savings account, I should be able buy a new one by Wednesday next week. This would be the most easy fix but I'll have to wait until Wednesday before I can confirm if it'll work.

The second option could be easy or hard depending on how things go as it involves figuring out why my Vsync  thing is so high whenever I enter the studio or maker (Gets up to 800ms) I've tried different suggestions from a very helpful guy on discord but nothing has worked so far. He's also given me a few more suggestions to try but lack of electricity made me unable to cross more potential settings off the list today.

And finally the worst option is that my laptop has finally reached it's limit and I should get a new one.

My laptop is an old (HP EliteBook 840 G5  This is what I plan on getting) Dell Latitude E6520 with an integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000. This was apparently made to only run Microsoft spreadsheet type programs and it's a miracle that it was even able to start up Koikatsu much less run it for this long with bearable issues. 

The only solution for this issue would be to buy a new one and even with the support of my patreons and my current savings (excluding rent) it would take me until April next year to be able to get a $300 one that will be to handle Koikatsu for another 2-3 years.

I'm really hoping that the first or even the second option will be able to get things working again because I really don't want to go back to how things were mentally (or financially cause jobs for college students over here pay like $10 - $13 monthly on average) before I started making Visual novels. 

That's all for now, I'm really sorry for another long ass wall of text post, I just wanted to make everyone aware of the current situation just in case things don't go as planned. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed in hopes that one of the first two options work.

Thank you for your time and I hope to see you all soon with some good news.