SSD and WinXP

[kosgi]

Ok folks I need your assistance!

I've decided to buy an SSD up to around £100 (it'll be either the Vertex 60gb or the C300 64gb) and I wanted to ask two questions:

a) The Vertex is about £15-20 cheaper than the C300, is the price difference worth it? Asking since I'm on a budget.

b) I got WinXP, what do I need to do to make sure that I can use the SSD at it's full performance (I am almost certain I got AHCI in my mobo/bios so let's take that as a given), aware that I can get as much as SATA II will give me? I google'd but I could only find info dating up to 2008 on registry tweaks and all that, are these still applicable for WinXP users?

c) Something else I read and got me worried. I was leaning towards the Vertex 2E but it seems I have to align it (I am a WinXP user) before I install WinXP on it. However I don't have Vista/7 so I will probably need to use a tool (diskpar?) for that. Do I really need to go through this process? Is it only related to the Vertex 3E SSDs or to any SSD ?

Thanks a lot for all responses!

[mhanor]

I can't give you advice about the particular drive you should buy, but if you're going for XP, you should align each partition on that SSD, as it impacts write performance. I find it very easy to create manually aligned partitions by booting a live linux distro and using the fdisk tool. But you can find several tutorials on the net, google it.

[jim]

I'd spend the money on Windows 7, personally. Worry about the SSD later.

[kosgi]

Thanks a lot for the answers!

I probably need to change to Win7 overall methinks although I don't like to pay for something I don't really need at the moment.

[jim]

I get where you're coming from, and it makes sense, but SSDs work so much better with Windows 7 that it seems strange to buy an SSD without having Windows 7.

If you were talking about a graphics card then I would agree with you, but SSDs are a slightly different situation.