Ideas for customizing the OS with SSD please ?

- does NB mean notebook..??
- if so, I'd raise it up off the desk surface, to allow better airflow..

NB=NorthBridge

BugMeister said:

- any advice on usage of SSD's should contain info on moving folders off the SSD and onto storage HDD's

That depends on what you move. E.g., one could move the temp folder off, as it's the most scratched, but, if an application actually scratches the scratch disk, it becomes slow waiting for the disk and you have gained startup time only and sometimes not that, either.

Frankly, I'd go about this way:

* Can you afford another SSD (s)? Say, a 2-5 grand PC with several SSDs (like my home PC)? Then great, my advice to you is use it like it's a normal, fast hdd. At some point it will grow tired and you'll buy another in a couple of years. In that time, speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.

* Is your SSD expensive to you? Made an effort (desperate) to speed up a notebook or a low(er) and PC? Then you want to save it. Move off the disk with the critical stuff: Move Temp on HDD via junction, move off registry via reparse point or whatever trick you do I can't be responsible for, try to free up the disk as much as possible so it wears down (more) evenly and slowly, etc. You'll have a not-so-fast, but quite decent PC. Turning logging off will help, too. You probably don't read them anyway. Limit the Windows event log. Stuff like that.

One is unlikely to strike a balance because in my tests the best scratcher of the drive was the OS logging and scratching the registry and whatnot. So you either go all out trying to save the disk or you just leave it be. Anyways, one is likely to save the SSD from a 3 year death to a 3.5 year. Not worth the effort and the risk.

Reinstalls don't help SSDs.

BugMeister said:

now that's already a sizeable chunk of SSD space, but it suits my particular needs regarding speed of access, etc

They _are_ small and expensive aren't they? Make sure you don't fill it up. To each his own, but I usually have a -roughly- 30GB partition for the OS and I try to keep it under 20G used. This provides enough space to let the system handle stuff around. Remember, just because it doesn't feel fragmentation doesn't mean it's OK to leave it like that.

More fragments means that more entries in the MFT/FAT/WFS/whatever are needed to keep a list of all fragments. As a result, MFT grows, space goes gown, wear and tear increases.

When they said don't defrag, they didn't mean "never". Every now and then, a defragmentation is good for the filesystem. Don't do it too often, but do it. Let's say, 2 weeks? A month if you don't really use the PC over a few hours a day.

BugMeister said:

- some games simply thrive in the SSD environment - Farcry 2 is amazingly fast in 64-bit via the solid disk..

Apps that get real boosts from SSDs are usually applications that were starved of RAM. With games, this usually means that either you are low on free RAM or (more likely) that you have a low-RAM graphics card. New games require 768Mb for nice quality, some don't really run well without 1G.

Some games run better on weaker cards than mine because they have more G-RAM (mine is split in half because of crossfire). I've seen people score better than me with much cheaper cards because of the extra RAM since they could fit the textures and I couldn't. You might get a big hit out an upgrade in that sense.

BugMeister said:

- other, slower-paced games don't really benefit from the speed - unless you're simply impatient by nature..

I've found that games that use on-the-fly load (HL2, Portal) give me the best results since I'm actually watching the screen. I've also found that copying games on SSDs every few days so they play nice wastes the write cycles. I play games off the HDD array.

Cov said:

.. for CPU from 6.6 (E8400) to 7.3 (Q9550)
.. for RAM from 6.8 (4 GB) to 7.3 (8 GB)
.. for primary HDD from 5.3 (HDD) to 7.7 (SSD)
Don't know how reliable these numbers are, but still interesting.

6.6 was too low for q9550. I got 7.3 with 9650 when stock, 7.6 now (4.0 GHz). You can't get higher because you need 8 cores for 7.9.

I have 7.6 for RAM, and I have one of the fastest RAM in the world, with a 7-7-7-20 DDR3 at 1780 (1800) (Well, they were when I bought them. I think a Redline that beats them now. Anyway). But it will not rate you higher unless you get 8 GB (I have 4 1-Gb DIMMs).

Primary HDDs are limited to 5.9 for actual HDD because of seek time. I understand one needs SSD or somesuch for over 5.9. I now have 7.1. Also, free space is a factor in HDD rating, I score under you because I have ~10 GB free (30 GB partition), even though I have 2 SSDz in stripe (RAID0).

But none of it matters because with 6.2 on video (512 MB, remember?), so I'm on a 6.2 system, because of crossfire. Oh well :)

Hi, what is Ndi suppose to stand for ?
You talk a lot, don't you ?

Ndi said:

... 6.6 was too low for q9550. I got 7.3 with 9650 when stock ...

Read again, it says 6.6 (E8400)

..well, I get 7.6 for processor and 7.7 for RAM in WEI

- the three other entries are all 6.9 (- including the SSD/HDD set-up)
- and those performance results are with no overclocking, anywhere..
- I could probably tweak them right up to the max 7.9..

- but I won't - 'cos I don't need to..

- personally, I'd rather fine-tune the system than thrash the hardware..

BugMeister said:

- I could probably tweak them right up to the max 7.9.

You can't unless you upgrade or cheat. CPU rating isn't about how much you can compute, just as RAM isn't about speed. The score is aggregate and requires certain conditions to qualify. Gaming is also affected by RAM, e.g.

AFAIK, you need 8 cores to qualify for 7.9, as you need 8 G of RAM to qualify for 7.9. I don't know if the documentation I read was official or not, but it makes sense, since I score almost identical to quite different hardware, inferior performance-wise.

Also, the detailed rating report seems to suggest as much.

Cov said:

Read again, it says 6.6 (E8400)

My bad.

I wish it were a rule that no one could ever post a tweak without also posting exactly how to undo that tweak. The only exception would be for checking or unchecking radio boxes. Posters submitting a tweak should also state the possible unintended consequences of that tweak. Microsoft may not be gods gift to computing but they usually have a good reason for their defaults.

Most of the useful settings that pertain to optimizing performance on the SSD are done automatically by Windows7. The Win7 installer can detect that it is not a spinning disk and configure the system accordingly.
Beyond that, there are probably further settings that can tweak another few percent of performance. For those though, one should study the details in depth and see whether it is worth it.
Here is a pretty good article summarizing what is being done by Win7: Engineering Windows 7 : Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives