Ideas for customizing the OS with SSD please ?

[pauldarkside]

I believe AHCI is required to enable TRIM, and the firmware on the SSD drive has to report itself correctly to the OS for Superfetch to be disabled.
(I have 1x SSD and 2x SATA2 drives, and Superfetch was off as soon as I installed Win7 RTM.)

Hmm, that's annoying. Wiper (OCZ's garbage collector) doesn't like AHCI, under IDE the process takes around 30-40 seconds, under AHCI however, it'll take several hours to complete. So has TRIM actually been implemented? The last I'd read was that it was still in development, hence why I'm having to use Wiper.

[pauldarkside]

Realistically i'll probably replace the drive (like any drive) before I hit the max writes anyway - it's not something that bothers me on a modern SSD with wear levelling etc. I'm sure that in a couple of years i'll be buying an even faster, even cheaper, even bigger drive etc

I'll likely end up doing exactly the same. At the same time though, it'd be nice to have another system inherit it. I'm not keen on the idea of needlessly wasting its lifespan.

[PeteSmith]

I've seen 'tweak' guides for years for windows and almost none of them have any real world impact on performance or advocate disabling features due to lack of understanding of what they actually do (or how they're configured)

I think the performance gains depend largly on the system your running, if you have a old system which is starting to struggle then some of these tweaks may help people squeeze some extra life out of there legacy hardware. Disabling services which are not needed may knock a few seconds of boot time, that sort of thing.

I think most of these 'tweak' guides have a disclaimer which states, if you don't know what it does then leave it alone.

[dangel]

I'll likely end up doing exactly the same. At the same time though, it'd be nice to have another system inherit it. I'm not keen on the idea of needlessly wasting its lifespan.

I'm still not convinced you'd be doing any more so that with a mechanical drive - that and the fact that something like a pagefile is 40 reads to a write in actual use anyway and is absolutely ideal for SSD given the tiny writes and reads it's nominally doing. Same is true for temp files - and all this is stuff i'd like sped up by an SSD!

[dangel]

I think most of these 'tweak' guides have a disclaimer which states, if you don't know what it does then leave it alone.

More so the problem is claiming that you'll gain performance from turning off features which actually boost it - realistically for 99% of people these guides are a huge waste of time and are often written by people who have no idea whatsoever what they're doing. None of this is a tirade against the OP or anyone in particular but the label 'snake oil' doesn't half sit well on this kind of stuff.

[pauldarkside]

At least the OP didn't get the judicial stoning here that he got at Hardforum...

That said, I'm firmly in the "leave it alone" camp.

It doesn't help anyone just posting to slate someone without explaining why you disagree.

Ignoring the validity of those tweaks, and in reply to the poll, I wouldn't say it's a useful list. Far too often it doesn't tell the reader why you think they ought to do something. Without that, it's just a rehash of countless other tweak sheets out there.

[jim]

I'm not really sure I agree with much of what you've suggested - the defrag change makes sense when we're talking about SSDs, but otherwise none of it really has much to do with the SSD side of things, especially since as far as a lot of people are concerned this "SSD wear" issue is largely a myth anyway.

It just seems to be a list of tweaks for Vista, rebadged as Windows 7 tweaks - and this isn't really aimed at you and your thread, but at the sources for this information who pump it out as advice without any evidence to back it up. The question really is how much functionality you're prepared to lose for performance, and the more I read the more I find out that you don't even gain any performance in the first place.

Disabling UAC, page file, system restore, indexing, automatic updates, and removing the recycle bin icon is hardly going to improve performance in any way. UAC is getting better - to the point of being a valuable security tool, as is a firewall, page file removal has been debunked thoroughly in your hardforum thread, system restore - yeah it'll save a bit of disk space, but extremely useful, removing indexing will screw up all searching...

And surely uninstalling programs would be a far better move than disabling their startup in msconfig? If you mean services, that should be done in services.msc rather than msconfig, and makes no difference anyway, according to the tests I've seen.

[pauldarkside]

I'm still not convinced you'd be doing any more so that with a mechanical drive - that and the fact that something like a pagefile is 40 reads to a write in actual use anyway and is absolutely ideal for SSD given the tiny writes and reads it's nominally doing. Same is true for temp files - and all this is stuff i'd like sped up by an SSD!

I'm more inclined to move temporary internet files (the type of item I do move) as it's mostly content I'm only going to view once. I've not validated it but I'd guess that writes *outweight reads in that sort of scenario.

Out of interest, what garbage collection are you using?

Edit: *can't believe I typed "outway"

[dangel]

W7 introduces triggered services anyway - they can fire up when needed and then fire down again..

[dangel]

I'm more inclined to move temporary internet files (the type of item I do move) as it's mostly content I'm only going to view once. I've not validated it but I'd guess that writes outway reads in that sort of scenario.

Out of interest, what garbage collection are you using?

Cambridgeshire County Council

I'd use ccleaner for cleaning up temp files etc and i'll be relying on TRIM for the new SSD cleaning (if that's what you meant!).

In all seriousness - i'm going to be using my SSD to deal with temp files as much as anything else - there's little point in buying something if you're not going to use it as intended. I'd never buy a car and then just pop it in the garage for eternity because i'm too worried about wearing it out..

[Infinite]

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/wi...ws_on_a_VERTEX

Last Windows 7:

1 Superfetch
2 Windows Defragmenter
3 Drive Indexing

These are the bare minimum you need to turn off, with these off you should see lightening performance from VERTEX, further tweaks can be applied BUT they are more involved and more for those looking to squeeze the extra 3% of performance from their systems.

The has to be some truth from this OCZ wiki page. xD

[CaptainCrash]

It doesn't help anyone just posting to slate someone without explaining why you disagree.

sigh... I wasn't personally "slating" anyone, what on earth gave you that idea? I just thought the difference between this thread and the one at [H] was mildly amusing.

As for why I disagree: "because Win7 seems to work fine in its default configuration, I don't see any evidence that tweaking it as suggested will make it work better, and may in some cases make things less efficient as has been previously suggested." Happy now?

[pauldarkside]

sigh... I wasn't personally "slating" anyone, what on earth gave you that idea? I just thought the difference between this thread and the one at [H] was mildly amusing.

As for why I disagree: "because Win7 seems to work fine in its default configuration, I don't see any evidence that tweaking it as suggested will make it work better, and may in some cases make things less efficient as has been previously suggested." Happy now?

To clarify, you posted a link to where people were slating the OP for his effort - it's those replies I was referring to.

[watercooled]

Very useful but TBH I wouldn't disable the PF. I also disable Superfetch on standard HDD systems - it just seems to constantly thrash the HDD, caching random isos and other stuff I barely access with no noticeable performance benefit. Saying that a lot of your suggestions are useful to both SSD and HDD systems!

[noobieocer]

oo this might be useful when i get my ssd

[Paul Adams]

I also disable Superfetch on standard HDD systems - it just seems to constantly thrash the HDD, caching random isos and other stuff I barely access with no noticeable performance benefit.

Superfetch's power really comes into play with frequently used files - size doesn't matter as Windows caches based on logical file sections, not disk blocks or entire files.
When I spent hours per week playing WoW, the load time on Vista was phenomenally fast, despite the amount and size of the data files it requested.

If you use small apps that work with temporary files, the value of prefetching diminishes greatly.