Likewise whs I got my Toshiba L550 "latest thing out" only to see the dealer had the L650 in the shop the very next week - worse still at a cheaper "introductory" price - I wasn't impressed to say the least.
Notwithstanding I have nothing but problems with the L550 since I got it (and the very last Toshiba product I shall ever buy).
I also had a 24" Toshiba monitor that dropped a bundle of pixels after two months so it's sitting in the spare room as a spare.
Toshiba -
My 3 month old Toshiba laptop has to be mailed into their shop next week. They are currently sending me a box. The mousepad and the clickers stopped working over night. And that is not a software problem. I checked all angles, reset to a restore point from last month and also tried with Win8.
I bought the thing because it has a backlit keyboard (which is very dim though) after I had to return my superb Sony which had a completely retarded BIOS - the saga is here. But quality wise the Sony was miles better than the Toshiba, it was also more expensive.
After doing tweaks that I lost count on I think these helped significantly although I don't know which one because I was't testing after each one.
-in power options set turn off hard drive to "never"
-decrease regedit "WaitToKillServiceTimeout" to 2 sec
-patriot ssd drives have "garbage collection" that from what I understand is kinda like defrag for ssd and they recommend leaving comp overnight to idle and let it do whatever it does.
This morning when I returned to it, monitor was off (it is set to turn off at some point) and comp was frozen, press and hold power button, back ON, everything seems OK, good.
Then I tested times again and now it's ~40sec for ON and ~10sec for OFF.
This I can live with and finally feel I got my money's worth.
PS my wife was mocking me "oh you're gonna save so much time now", why is it that they absolutely don't care about these life saving details?
Yeah I know what you mean whs I had to factory default my L550 four times and it still is only 95c in the dollar. In my mind Toshiba has gone down the toilet as far as quality goes and like I said after that monitor no more Toshiba stuff for me unless they ca get their act together.
I bought a cheap little Compaq for a knockabout and yes it's a bit slower but quality wise it out strips the Toshy. As a matter of interest I have done some work on HP's and Compaq's just lately and am impressed with the build quality especially the older stuff. Mind you the bundled stuff is a erm pain eh?
I loved my 2007 HP desktop. I took it apart a few times and changed PSU, Graphics and added the SSD. Real easy to work with. Now I have this Dell XPS - supposedly their top of the line. Looks like a Cadillac from the outside and like a Yugo from the inside - in other words a real mess. But I should have known better. I have a Dell Inspiron 530 in Germany and that is the same mess. It does not even have disk bays. Had to install my SSD with Velcro dots.
Tutorial looks great - thanks - and I'm about to try it out. But I have a Q first.
In my Disk Management window instead of a System Reserved partition with the Bootmgr, I see one called Recovery (see below). I'm assuming this partition has the bootmgr because it indicates it as 'system, active'. But rather than being 100MB, this partition is 14.65GB! Any ideas on why this is? It's a Dell laptop and Window 7 HE 64-bit came preinstalled so I can only assume that the extra space is taken up by Dell's various recovery tools. Also, what's the purpose of the 39MB OEM partition? Is this important to transfer over?
In this case rather than copy the bootmgr to the C: before transfering over just the C: partition to the SSD, I'm thinking I should transfer over the Recovery partition as well. The SSD is a 256GB Crucial so I have some space to spare. Any thoughts?
Tx
This is no problem. I have two Dell systems myself and know the setup. It is actually a smart setup because it a) saves an extra system partition and b) if you ever want to install Windows 8 in a double boot, you would have enough room for the very large Windows 8 BCD.
Nevertheless, I always transferred the bootmgr first to C because I do not run double boots. I run my Windows 8 in virtual Box which is a lot more practical.
So you have 2 options:
Option 1. transfer the bootmgr to C first with this procedure: Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD It is very simple and takes only 2 minutes.
Option 2. Make 2 partitions on the SSD - the first one must be aligned, then the second one is aligned automatically. It must also be sized. The partition creation command would then be create partition primary align=1024 size=15000. This would create a 15GB partition for your recovery partition. For the rest of the unallocated space you then create a partition for the OS. That can be a logical partition. I would use Disk Management to do that because then you need not have to calculate the offset and the exact size.
You then make two independent images of these two partitions on the HDD and dump them into their respective SSD partitions. Just make sure that the C partition on the HDD is not larger then the partition you got on the SSD for it. If it is larger for starters, then you have to first shrink it down. During that operation I also recommend to eliminate the hiberfile with the powercfg -h off command and to reduce the pagefile to 2GB.
Another really simple option would be to use the Paragon Migration Tool. It costs $19.95 but it does the job with 2 clicks - alignment, transfer of both partitions, shrink C: and make settings that you otherwise have to do manually.
PS: The little 39MB partition is for Dell tools. Leave it alone. No need to transfer it. It is probably transferred in Fat32 anyhow.
That reminds me that your SSD does not seem to be formatted. Format it in NTFS first - with Disk Management and do not allocate unaligned partitions.
Thanks for the quick and thorough response whs - which of course leads me to more questions
1) When you say the Dell setup saves an extra system partition, what do you mean, are there two bootmgrs?
2) What is a double boot? - is that when there are two bootmgrs in seperate partitions?
3) If I transfer the bootmgr to C: first using EasyBCD, should I make an image of the Recovery partition to DVD as a backup and then not bother installing it on the SSD?
4) I've already initialized the SSD in Disk Management and used the commands you list in the "geeky way" to align the SSD, but you're right I don't recall formatting it. Should I format it in Disk Management and then recreate the partition with create partition primary align=1024 size=15000 ? Or will the alignment stay intact if I format, and could I then use Partition Wizard to simpy change the size of the partition to 15GB, and then create the C: partition using Disk Management?
5) I will have to shrink down the C: partition - was going to use Partition Wizard. Can I make the changes to the hiberfile and pagefile there? Or use your command?
Sorry for all the questions. I like to really understand what I'm doing, both out of interest and to make sure I don't mess things up! - cheers
1. There is only 1 bootmgr - the one in the recovery partition. But normally you would have that extra dumb 100MB active system partition. That is as needed as a shot into the knee.
2. Double boot is when you run multiple systems on the same PC. There is only one bootmgr but all partitions put their BCD into that bootmgr's partition.
3. That is an option. But NEVER image to DVDs, only to disks. But you can burn recovery DVDs from the recovery partition - that is not imaging. You can also leave it sitting on the HDD.
4. The alignment stays intact when you format it in Disk Management. You can always check that as per the tutorial. If you do not plan to move the recovery partition and move the bootmgr to C:, no need to recreate the partition on the SSD.
5. For the hiberfile you need to use the command. For the pagefile, type pagefile into Start/search. It will tell you how to do that.Partition Wizard is OK, but can be very dangerous. If you make a mistake, you may loose everything on the disk (has happened to me). Better first make safety images of everything. Then after shrinking, you have to image C: again for the SSD.
No problem, keep asking what you do not yet understand. If you don't ask, you never learn anything.
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