Clone Dual Boot on SSD

Thanks DavidE for the info on boot managers etc. I made a screen shot with the original HDD but can’t find it. Anyway it’s identical to what you’ll find in post #9 except that the unallocated space to the right of C: is only about 20MB and the total drive size shows up at about 55.5MB. All else is same on the HDD starting point for clone to SSD.
Yes, I still want and do have a Dual Boot now on the SDD per post #6. The only issue since my last post was getting the OEM partition to work properly. It contains the Dell Diagnostic Tools which are worth having though not essential. System specs of the Dell Latitude D630 Laptop are Core 2 Duo T7500, 2.2GHz, 2GB ram, XP Pro with Win 7 Home Premium added as dual boot as per subject of this thread.
So, back to the remaining issue. Recall the OEM partition was not working as of my last post #9. Since then, I imaged the OEM partition of the original HDD and recovered it to the SDD. That solved the problem and the bootable Diagnostics worked. However then the OEM partition was not aligned for SDD use. Its first sector was 63. So, I used Partition Wizzard to align it and also to adjust the sizes of the other partitions to something more suitable and add a data partition. The alignment process resulted in the first sector of the OEM partition moving from 63 to 2048 as expected. Also PW shrunk the OEM partition by about 1MB which shouldn’t matter. After that, all continued to work fine but the Diagnostics went dead at the point where it would normally boot to the OEM Partition. I thought about it for a little and concluded that you really can’t move the OEM partition without getting into trouble. My theory which I would very much like some feedback on is as follows. The Dell diagnostics is in two parts. First some very basic testing is done right from the Bios. If the user wants more exhaustive testing there is a prompt to continue at which point the bios points to the OEM partition and boots from it into the test program. Since the OEM partition is hidden and has no drive letter my speculation is that to do anything with it you need to know exactly where to go on the drive. That information is likely hardwired into the bios and can’t be changed. Ergo the OEM partition must begin at sector 63 as Dell designed which means you can not align it for an SSD! Its either aligned and doesn’t work or it’s not aligned and does! I opted to re-image it again and keep the original alignment and this worked fine. My thinking is that it is not important for this partition to be aligned as long as the other partitions are. From what I’ve read, alignment is important to achieve proper speed and lifetime from the SSD. Since the OEM partition is very rarely used, not being in alignment will have no effect on the lifetime of the SSD. Also, since this is a very small diagnostic utility speed is not important. Ergo I thought there was no problem living with an OEM partition out of alignment. I would like your comments on this conclusion since I may have overlooked something. Here are my remaining questions:
1. As per above I would like comments, agree/disagree with my conclusion that a misaligned OEM partition is no big deal.
2. I’ve read that defragmentation should be turned off for SSDs. Is this good guidance? My win 7 is already 8% fragmented probably from the resizing and moving around. I’d like to get some thoughts on this before I defrag or turn it off.
3. Any thoughts on updating drivers to go from IDE mode to AHCI? I attached the benchmark. The specs of the SSD are here: SanDisk SSD PLUS 2.5" 120GB SATA Revision 3.0 (6 Gbit/s) Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SDSSDA-120G-G25 - Newegg.com it seems the write speeds are somewhat better then specified and the read speeds are less. I’m not even sure if I have sata2 or sata1 but the read speed of 237MHz would imply sata2. I guess AHCI might bring that up to 300MHz. Any thoughts?
Also, I attached the final disk manager screen of the present configuration. All works fine. Thanks for reading and I look forwards to your comments on the above opened questions or anything else.

I agree with you about the alignment of the OEM partition.
I don't think it will hurt the SSD to have that partition misaligned so you can use the diagnostic tools if/when needed.

Defrag should not be used on SSD's.
Make sure the Defrag scheduled task(s) does not auto defrag the SSD partitions.
I don't remember if XP has a Defrag scheduled task.
Trim should be used for SSD's.
Here is a tutorial that has info about Trim:
SSD Tweaks and Optimizations in Windows 7

As far as i know XP does not support Trim.
The SSD manufacturer may offer a utility to use Trim with XP.
You would have to search for that, or ask SanDisk.

AHCI is preferred and could offer some performance improvements over IDE.
Here is a tutorial for changing Win 7 to AHCI:
AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

Here is an article i found for changing XP to AHCI:
https://expertester.wordpress.com/20...ci-windows-xp/
I've never done this, so i can't comment on any problems, if it works, etc.

Create Backup Images before making these changes so you can easily recover if anything goes wrong.

Thanks very much DavidE for your interest and all of your help! Very much appreciated! I'm going to mark this thread as solved.