Try using hibernate and see if it boots faster. Somewhere - IIRC - I read that one of the Win8 changes was that it shuts down and boots up faster because it does it more like hibernate in 7.
Have you tried a fast memory card (like class 10) or usb for ready-boost? It will probably be limited to ~2GB so it doesn’t need to be really large, unless you want some spare storage in the same device. This gives you some of the effect of a hybrid (at least compared to the one we put in my son’s laptop - I was disappointed with the hybrid and I’m pretty sure it’s a 750). I noticed ready-boost more when I take it offline after a few days than when I set it up. Routine programs seem to load slower without it.
What is that $175 price for? Are you saying for the hybrid drive?
I purchased a 750GB Momentus XT about a month ago at a local Microcenter for $114. And then, I saw the same drive for about $105 later :(… You’ll see them go on sale once in awhile at Newegg.com, etc.
BTW, do you defrag your hard drive? If you don’t do that, it might help if you did that.
Last year, we were visiting my wife’s brother, and his daughter was complaining about how slow her PC was, and I asked if she ever defragged her drive. She didn’t know what that was :), so I went ahead and did that, which took overnight, since she hadn’t done that before.
Anyway, the next day, she said that it was running much faster, and was happy with that.
Also, do you still have the original hard drive in it? If so, that’s probably a 5400 RPM drive, so basically almost any drive you get would be faster, e.g., a 7200 RPM would be faster.
Also, as I mentioned re. the hybrid drive, how well it works depends a lot on your usage pattern. For example, it’s not very helpful if there’s a lot of sequential reads, since every read would be different in that case. On the other hand, if there’s a lot of random reads, then it’ll be more noticeable because there’s a better chance that something will be on the SSD.
Another example: When I got one, I was copying a bunch of large files over to the new drive, which would be mainly sequential. Speed was ok, about what you would expect for 7200 RPM drive. The files were VMDKs for virtual machines, and I then ran the virtual machines off of the Momentus XT, and performance of the virtual machines was much improved compared to when the VMDKs were on a spinning media.
My first thought - after reading through the followups and your initial post - is WHY?
Boot speed(?)… are you doing extensive numerical computations(?) You’ve got a decently POWERFUL (!) laptop…
Regardless of the answers to those questions, please be aware that SSD’s appear to more problematic than the IDE/PATA/SATA ones, especially when it comes to selling(wiping your data).
Additionally, their lifetime is somewhat circumspect: hey, though I’ve seen my share of failed drives, my 1998 5.6GB IBM is still chugging along with only 3 reallocated sectors…
Think ’bout the number of times your USB thumbdrives failed… that’s ’bout it for the SSD’s…
If it does well, then continue using it. There will always be newer and better laptops that will come along. Knowing how stiff competition between electronics companies these days.
It’s a windows freeby: Macrium Reflect off of USB (clones the drive including the boot sector so you won’t have any problems booting).
Just completed this the other day for a “client’s” old PATA/IDE laptop… the new drive (250gb from 100gb booted perfectly and we didn’t have to run any windows boot sector reconfiguration (Mac’s or Linux will differ).
Hey anyway, like what I said, why change with what you’ve got running already (other than imaging for a backup)?
Clonezilla’s a highly recommended freeby as well as “Reflect” but never used so I cannot comment on its “boot”/clone capability.
Tough to argue though with all of that great open-source stuff available at Sourceforge…
Strong suggestion that you plan this out… recommending you image your current drive to another SATA you can plug right in (in case things DON’T go as planned…)
i have today off of work, im going to try a power defrag and a few other things to see if i can increase start up time
i havent tried ready boost, but i have 8gb of ram… i dont think win 7 would need much more?
edit: it looks like its very very difficult to image/clone my stock hard drive and have it work correctly… the first 16 gb of the drive is partitioned as “hp recovery” and it looks like this is partitioned before the MBR… the win 7 OEM license is “tatooed” to the first bytes of the hd… unless thisi s cloned in gparted byte for byte - it wont work…
it looks like the easiest way to migrate to a new hd, is to use a ms win 7 image with my oem key and activate by phone… ive actually done this once before
in all honesty after thinking about this last night and this morning - i am going to try a few more tweaks and clean ups before i decide to drop $100+ on a new drive… my pc takes about 2m from turn on till the hd light goes off, which isnt really that bad… some programs thrash a bit on startup but they run fine once they are loaded… i have a 7200 rpm drive… i would think it would be faster… maybe i should try a fresh install of windows 7 and see if that helps before trying a new drive…
i might also try a different antivirus… im using avg free now… its alright i guess
Ugghhh… it’s Windows: at the very least ya’ need to to type “msconfig” into the “Run” box and then get rid of all of the JUNK that’s clouding up your your Startup and Services…
It’s not the HD or the ram, or hibernate/standby…
That “hp recovery” partition is actually located AFTER your boot sector… it’s be easy to clear everything by booting into that partition and reformatting but that’d reset and wipe your current drive.
Sorry jmpaul320, it’d be really difficult walking you through this on the forum but, I’m sure most who’re familiar with Windows will agree, it’s not a problem with your drive… cloning it to another - even if it booted - would retain these problems in the registry.
My suggestion - if you wish to retain most of the settings and files - would be to locate a reliable computer “geek”.
One to four hours to clean up the partition… a new hard drive with your current Registry and cloned drive will NOT change things much.
Two minutes for your i7 to boot? Yep, that drive is thrashing through the registry (map of your disk and programs). Time for an expert intervention of cleaning, or a clean install.
thats what i suspected… defrag is finishing up now… only 4% fragmented… maybe ill look into a few registry tweaks (i will back up before any changes)
performance improved after moving 250gb of music off my drive (now only 30% of the drive is used)
i also stopped a few useless windows services that are never used
it sounds like you are right about the registry… i have already run msconfig and ccleaner in the past to remove unwanted startup programs and simple registry errors… maybe i need to look into a more in depth registry scanner?
You shouldn’t store critical data in any exclusive place at all, backups should always be made. Any drive is capable of failing, no matter whether it’s SSD or a HDD.
Anyways, Samsung 840 Pro is one of most reliable drives on the market. But not the non-Pro! There’s a huge difference between them. To top that, it also has excellent performance, and doesn’t cheats in benchmarks (unlike most Sandforce drives)
my startup time has gone from ~125 sec to 80 seconds
(time from cold power on until the hard disk light stops flashing in win 7)
this is what i did
move all my music (250 gb) to an external device (i only had 5% disk space free)
defrag (was only 5% fragmented but ran anyway with defraggler)
ran ccleaner to remove some temp files
ran registry cleaner in ccleaner
ran registry cleaner in glary ultilites
ran other glary utilities to improve performance
disabled some unnecessary windows services that are never used
turn off windows aero desktop
i did not have a need to run msconfig and remove startup items as i usually actively keep on top of what is running
Wow.
My laptop has Celeron B820, 4GB RAM, integrated GPU, and it boots <10 sec as I said earlier.
You’re doing something horribly wrong at this point. :s
