SSD worth it? recommendation? for this computer

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by c_hegge

I never defragment. It makes no difference to the performance and wears out the HDD. I do agree with you though on removing icons. I don't think it ever has made a difference and don't think it ever will.

I also disagree. On a badly fragmented drive using a good utility, it makes a HUGE difference! Its one of the best HDD performance enhancing things you can do.

[gg1978]

IME, the Intel X-25-M's and 320 series have been reliable, as well as the Samsung 470 and 830, in my daily use system.. I just picked up a Crucial M4 256G at newegg a couple of weeks ago for $160.. Cloned using Clonezilla from my old 470 Series Samsung to it just fine.


And to all the hater's on Vista/7, what do you intend on doing when XP Home/Pro goes out of patch support in August 2014??

Vista was shit when it was first released, SP1 fixed a lot of the snafus.. But if ya give it enough RAM, it runs just fine, fwiw. And 7's better.. :p Driver support on XP 64 bit was complete and utter shit when i was considering the upgrade when it was first released. Only in the Vista/7 generation has Windows gotten mature 64 bit driver support, with the attendant improvements.

Given a lot of the current / nexgen hardware is going to have 8Gig's of RAM standard soon enough, running an old 32 bit OS isn't going to make a lot of sense, given it's about a two year lifespan left in it.

[gg1978]

And when it comes to disabling auto java updates, adobe reader updates, etc.. THink about all the dumb users that don't know shit about updating their software before turning those off.. Being the probable first two vectors for driveby/malware infections, either don't have them installed on the system or keep them up to date..

Killing background services saves you very little in the sense of memory/CPU cycles. But paging to disk all the time is worst to be certain. Fixed size pagefile is a good idea though, i make it double the size of system RAM, except on 64 bit OS's, where it's 1.5X system RAM.

[severach]

Originally Posted by gg1978

And to all the hater's on Vista/7, what do you intend on doing when XP Home/Pro goes out of patch support in August 2014??

Hooray, no more updates. I'll be almost as overjoyed as when MS announced that IE-WFC won't be made for Windows XP. No more crap IE that I need to refuse every few months.

Continue to run XP until there's an unsolvable problem. XP is teh not suck so that could take years. The more the better. I want to send a message to Redmond: Windows is done, please stop working on it.

The only patch I can recall that was really important was just before XP SP2. Someone found a hole in the TCP/IP stack allowing malware to drill, deposit, and execute itself on any target system. No shares were required. An infected machine hits everything on the network as soon as it joins.

The only other security holes are IE and OE. Webmail solves the OE problem and Firefox solves the IE problem. So long as Firefox gets security updates, WFCs about the OS!

[c_hegge]

Originally Posted by ratdude747

I disagree. On units with a 5400RPM or slower HDD, it DOES make a difference when fragmentation is severe. My Dell Latitude D400 once was crippled by this; a defrag (using the auslogics utility) had a large impact.

Originally Posted by Topcat

I also disagree. On a badly fragmented drive using a good utility, it makes a HUGE difference! Its one of the best HDD performance enhancing things you can do.

Worst I've had was about 30% volume fragmentation. On an 80GB 7200RPM HDD, it made no difference whatsoever to the performance. Power on to HDD settled was still under 20 seconds and there was no improvememnt at all from a defrag.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Speaking of defrag, Win7 does it automatically in the background. @ mariushm: If you disable the Background Intelligent Transfer Service you lose automatic updates.

[mariushm]

You will still be notified there are updates available, at which point you can just start the service. I keep mine set on Manual start.
As for automatic defrag in Windows 7, I doubt that. It would have to be a service and I would have noticed it..

Ah yes, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2...rovements.aspx

I guess it uses Task Sheduler which I've disabled also, I don't have a need for it. I hope it disables itself with SSD drives, as defragmenting only hurts them... latency is identical no matter what you access on these ssd, what matters with ssd drives is just trim support (if the ssd doesn't do it itself in the background in firmware).

O&O Defrag is much better than the integrated defragmenter, so I don't use the integrated one:



The dark gray bar near the beginning is the hibernation file,
the light blue at the beginning are all the dll and kernel files,
darker blue are executables and resources and often accessed files,
brown stuff is pagefile.sys file which in my case it left in the center of partition because it determine it's not used a lot as I have 4 GB of ram so by placing it at the beginning of the drive before system files it would only hamper performance (dll and kernel files would be moved further so more disk access latency to them).

It's very nice software, you can double click on a cluster and see exactly what files are there so you can determine how well it optimized the file system.

(the fragmented files are mainly isos and avis I moved from the other drives when I did some video processing and needed extra room... o&o defrag won't start defragmenting those if there's very few fragments, it would be pointless.)

Worst I've had was about 30% volume fragmentation. On an 80GB 7200RPM HDD, it made no difference whatsoever to the performance. Power on to HDD settled was still under 20 seconds and there was no improvememnt at all from a defrag.

It makes a lot of difference if you're low on memory. When you have reasonable amount of memory, Windows tends to keep more in ram cached, so when you launch applications, the libraries and windows files are already somewhat into memory so disk access is reduced. When you install applications in time, not everything at the beginning on a formatted disk, the files are dumped wherever windows determines it's enough space to allocate the files as continuously as possible, it makes no determination as to what purpose that file is for.
Even the integrated degragmenter, I'm not sure if it's a "smart" one. A good defragmenter moves the files based on the type (executables, page file, hibernation, dll, resource files etc) not just to have the files in continuous blocks.
O&O Defrag actually monitors what you access and on consecutive runs it will start to move those often accessed files towards the beginning of the drive to improve performance.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Originally Posted by mariushm

I guess it uses Task Sheduler which I've disabled also, I don't have a need for it.

Just because you don't need it, doesn't mean everyone else doesn't. I for example use it every now and then.

Originally Posted by mariushm

I hope it disables itself with SSD drives, as defragmenting only hurts them...

It does.

Originally Posted by mariushm

O&O Defrag
[...]

And Vopt is better than O&O Defrag. It's a tiny bit of software that does a mighty fine job. Fastest defragger i've ever used. Nowadays i just let Windows itself take care of it tho.

[lti]

What is wrong with the built-in Windows defragmenter?

Originally Posted by shovenose

Which computer?
The XP Dell or the Asus X44H?

I was asking about the Asus.

[smason]

Originally Posted by lti

How long does this computer take to boot up?

In my experience, cleaning the registry can also break installed software and will eventually corrupt the registry, forcing the user to reinstall Windows.

There's a big difference between CLEANING the registry, and farking it up.

Using crappy tools to do it for you will definitely fark it up. Use a good tool, and check what it's doing before you approve the changes.

I'm always amazed at what crap the computer is trying to load, AFTER a program is uninstalled. Watching a system monitor trying to find and run non-existant files. A GOOD registry tool can tell if an entry is doing something silly like that, and delete it without breaking anything.

[smason]

Originally Posted by gg1978

Vista was shit when it was first released, SP1 fixed a lot of the snafus.. But if ya give it enough RAM, it runs just fine, fwiw. And 7's better.. :p

Agreed!
I look after about 100 computers at work, the newest ones are Win7, the older ones Vista. A few straggler XP boxes.
All are fine, and stable unless a user does something stupid (yeah right...)

Ok, the Vista print spooler crashes more than it should, but otherwise no issues.

I tested 2 identical 745s and Win7 was definitely faster than XP.

The Win7 search indexer is awesome. Way better than Vista, you don't get the performance hit that Vista had. And way better than the 3rd party one I used to use.
I'm fully paperless at home.
A while ago I had a disk fail. I just typed the model number into the search, and up popped the invoice. I can keyword search anything, and have it instantly. Bills, bank statements, anything.

Win 7s defrag seems to work pretty well too.

[Kiriakos GR]

I bet that life with desktop systems and hard drives it is more easy.

XP Pro + dual WD 10.000rpm on Raid 1, and my system looks and feels fast.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

A laptop with a 10.000 rpm hard drive = a laptop with no battery life.

[shovenose]

I'm not going to get the SSD any time soon after all, as I need the storage space I have (320GB). In fact, I'm considering sticking my extra 640GB drive in here instead...

[mattch]

Norton?! that is your problem...

SSD are smoking fast, makes world of difference on my 6y/o dell core2duo.

if your disk is near full that will cause windows to freak and frag like crazy = sloooow

if still slow then prob a virus snuck in there. Actually i can almost guarantee there is some form malware.