Re: [H] The SSD and how Windows can make your life miserable
Understood that a fresh install will align everything for the fastest performance. However, Windows here just made sure that it loaded everything from the old drive. For some reason, it never bothered trying to load Windows from the SSD. On 5/17/2013 9:06 PM, Dave Gibney wrote: My laptop drive was giving me signs of eminent failure. I has a local guy install a SAMSUG SSD and clone to it. It worked, but I wasn't happy with all the results. The next weekend, I did a fresh install Win-7 Ultimate, Office 2010, etc. Cycling through all the updates and getting the drivers up to date took a while, but no real problems. It is much faster on boot and the quiet is scary :) -Original Message- From: hardware-boun...@lists.hardwaregroup.com [mailto:hardware-boun...@lists.hardwaregroup.com] On Behalf Of Steve Tomporowski Sent: Friday, May 17, 2013 5:48 PM To: hardw...@lists.hardwaregroup.com Subject: [H] The SSD and how Windows can make your life miserable Last weekend I cloned my main drive over to an SSD and then booted. Some things looked faster, but I wasn't blown away by the speed. I have found out why. It began on Patch Tuesday. 4 of 6 patches failed. Windows update threw some errors, but as I had a design review coming up at work, I was too buys obsessing about that to work on it. Today, a day off! I decided to look into the errors. Ran update again, same problems. Searching on the errors, it seemed to indicate that Update has a problem when you move stuff from C: somewhere else, like when you install an SSD. The only thing I really fudged with there is that I moved the Temp and Tmp folders. I moved them back, same problem. I wondered if I didn't do something else and forgot about it. Back to System and Advanced Settings. This time I looked a the lower half of the window. Half of my windows variables were pointing to my old boot drive which is now E: ! When I booted to the SSD the first time, I kept the old boot drive in the system, just changed the boot order in the BIOS. Wrong! Windows apparently got confused and I ended up with a mishmash. My %systemroot% was now E instead of C! Just a word of caution. Going to clone the drive again (it wouldn't boot properly on it's own) and this time remove the old drive. Well, that's how ya learn Steve
Re: [H] The SSD and how Windows can make your life miserable
Steve, Thanks for the view of your conversion/installation. You have demonstrated my biggest fear of moving forward until I create a roadmap of How to... with what to use, why use it, what to expect. It has been 4 years since I have built a PC from scratch. I recall in the good-ole-days, we all used a program post Format to set a Primary, Active partition. All other partitions were set to Extended NTFS. Sadly, I have forgotten the name of this program and don't even know if I still have it archived. Now I just use the Windows install media to create (I believe?) the 'new' initial Primary and Active partition and then use the Disk Manager in the Administrative tools post install to add/shape the remaining partitions. It does seem to me that you could possibly edit your boot.ini file to point Windows back to whichever drive you choose to boot from. I have done this in the dim past with some success. From your decription, Your old EM drive is/was your %SystemRoot%; and, it contained partitions c:\ and d:\. And, I read that your new SSD is now e:\. Am I correct? Otherwise, I am very confused! Duncan On 05/18/2013 07:03, Steve Tomporowski wrote: Understood that a fresh install will align everything for the fastest performance. However, Windows here just made sure that it loaded everything from the old drive. For some reason, it never bothered trying to load Windows from the SSD. On 5/17/2013 9:06 PM, Dave Gibney wrote: My laptop drive was giving me signs of eminent failure. I has a local guy install a SAMSUG SSD and clone to it. It worked, but I wasn't happy with all the results. The next weekend, I did a fresh install Win-7 Ultimate, Office 2010, etc. Cycling through all the updates and getting the drivers up to date took a while, but no real problems. It is much faster on boot and the quiet is scary :) -Original Message- From: hardware-boun...@lists.hardwaregroup.com [mailto:hardware-boun...@lists.hardwaregroup.com] On Behalf Of Steve Tomporowski Sent: Friday, May 17, 2013 5:48 PM To: hardw...@lists.hardwaregroup.com Subject: [H] The SSD and how Windows can make your life miserable Last weekend I cloned my main drive over to an SSD and then booted. Some things looked faster, but I wasn't blown away by the speed. I have found out why. It began on Patch Tuesday. 4 of 6 patches failed. Windows update threw some errors, but as I had a design review coming up at work, I was too buys obsessing about that to work on it. Today, a day off! I decided to look into the errors. Ran update again, same problems. Searching on the errors, it seemed to indicate that Update has a problem when you move stuff from C: somewhere else, like when you install an SSD. The only thing I really fudged with there is that I moved the Temp and Tmp folders. I moved them back, same problem. I wondered if I didn't do something else and forgot about it. Back to System and Advanced Settings. This time I looked a the lower half of the window. Half of my windows variables were pointing to my old boot drive which is now E: ! When I booted to the SSD the first time, I kept the old boot drive in the system, just changed the boot order in the BIOS. Wrong! Windows apparently got confused and I ended up with a mishmash. My %systemroot% was now E instead of C! Just a word of caution. Going to clone the drive again (it wouldn't boot properly on it's own) and this time remove the old drive. Well, that's how ya learn Steve
Re: [H] The SSD and how Windows can make your life miserable
If anything things have gotten easier. I just built two new systems in the last 6 months. A lot of the tweaking needed to get a system running is no longer needed. UEFI is a lot better than the old BIOS. If you're installing Windows, it does all the partition stuff for you. If you want to do something creative or manual, I suggest getting a program called Gparted and putting it on a bootable USB or disc. If you are upgrading to a new drive, you need to use some cloning software to avoid the problems with changing the drive mapping. I just upgraded to a bigger Samsung SSD and it came with cloning software. Brian Sent from my iPhone On May 18, 2013, at 10:12, DSinc dsinc...@epbfi.com wrote: Steve, Thanks for the view of your conversion/installation. You have demonstrated my biggest fear of moving forward until I create a roadmap of How to... with what to use, why use it, what to expect. It has been 4 years since I have built a PC from scratch. I recall in the good-ole-days, we all used a program post Format to set a Primary, Active partition. All other partitions were set to Extended NTFS. Sadly, I have forgotten the name of this program and don't even know if I still have it archived. Now I just use the Windows install media to create (I believe?) the 'new' initial Primary and Active partition and then use the Disk Manager in the Administrative tools post install to add/shape the remaining partitions. It does seem to me that you could possibly edit your boot.ini file to point Windows back to whichever drive you choose to boot from. I have done this in the dim past with some success. From your decription, Your old EM drive is/was your %SystemRoot%; and, it contained partitions c:\ and d:\. And, I read that your new SSD is now e:\. Am I correct? Otherwise, I am very confused! Duncan On 05/18/2013 07:03, Steve Tomporowski wrote: Understood that a fresh install will align everything for the fastest performance. However, Windows here just made sure that it loaded everything from the old drive. For some reason, it never bothered trying to load Windows from the SSD. On 5/17/2013 9:06 PM, Dave Gibney wrote: My laptop drive was giving me signs of eminent failure. I has a local guy install a SAMSUG SSD and clone to it. It worked, but I wasn't happy with all the results. The next weekend, I did a fresh install Win-7 Ultimate, Office 2010, etc. Cycling through all the updates and getting the drivers up to date took a while, but no real problems. It is much faster on boot and the quiet is scary :) -Original Message- From: hardware-boun...@lists.hardwaregroup.com [mailto:hardware-boun...@lists.hardwaregroup.com] On Behalf Of Steve Tomporowski Sent: Friday, May 17, 2013 5:48 PM To: hardw...@lists.hardwaregroup.com Subject: [H] The SSD and how Windows can make your life miserable Last weekend I cloned my main drive over to an SSD and then booted. Some things looked faster, but I wasn't blown away by the speed. I have found out why. It began on Patch Tuesday. 4 of 6 patches failed. Windows update threw some errors, but as I had a design review coming up at work, I was too buys obsessing about that to work on it. Today, a day off! I decided to look into the errors. Ran update again, same problems. Searching on the errors, it seemed to indicate that Update has a problem when you move stuff from C: somewhere else, like when you install an SSD. The only thing I really fudged with there is that I moved the Temp and Tmp folders. I moved them back, same problem. I wondered if I didn't do something else and forgot about it. Back to System and Advanced Settings. This time I looked a the lower half of the window. Half of my windows variables were pointing to my old boot drive which is now E: ! When I booted to the SSD the first time, I kept the old boot drive in the system, just changed the boot order in the BIOS. Wrong! Windows apparently got confused and I ended up with a mishmash. My %systemroot% was now E instead of C! Just a word of caution. Going to clone the drive again (it wouldn't boot properly on it's own) and this time remove the old drive. Well, that's how ya learn Steve
Re: [H] The SSD and how Windows can make your life miserable
Brian, Thank you for the share, but, I have quibbles. para1: I will not have the benefits of UEFI bios until I upgrade my m/b's to my new Z77 models, along with their new i5-3570K cpus. I still run XP on P65 C2D m/b's. So, OLD BIOS. I did try to use AHCI in bios when I built these PCs. It did not work well at all. I backed off to ESDI and have run for the past 4yrs w/SATA EM drives and opticals. And, yes, I have never loaded/used my Asus/JMicron drivers. So, adding an SSD to my current PCs is confusing. Especially with what Steve is dealing with. para2: I assume that 'gpartd' is an open-source linux program. I do not haveit. I am Win-blows locked on XPpro. Yes, I do have Win7pro for my new(pending) Z77 systems. para3: Yes, I accept cloning sw to move old sw to new SSD. Yet I am not convinced that the cloning sw included with a Samsung Pro 840 SSD is completely solid, so I remain on the fence. Thanks again for your share, Duncan On 05/18/2013 11:14, Brian Weeden wrote: If anything things have gotten easier. I just built two new systems in the last 6 months. A lot of the tweaking needed to get a system running is no longer needed. UEFI is a lot better than the old BIOS. If you're installing Windows, it does all the partition stuff for you. If you want to do something creative or manual, I suggest getting a program called Gparted and putting it on a bootable USB or disc. If you are upgrading to a new drive, you need to use some cloning software to avoid the problems with changing the drive mapping. I just upgraded to a bigger Samsung SSD and it came with cloning software. Brian Sent from my iPhone On May 18, 2013, at 10:12, DSinc dsinc...@epbfi.com wrote: Steve, Thanks for the view of your conversion/installation. You have demonstrated my biggest fear of moving forward until I create a roadmap of How to... with what to use, why use it, what to expect. It has been 4 years since I have built a PC from scratch. I recall in the good-ole-days, we all used a program post Format to set a Primary, Active partition. All other partitions were set to Extended NTFS. Sadly, I have forgotten the name of this program and don't even know if I still have it archived. Now I just use the Windows install media to create (I believe?) the 'new' initial Primary and Active partition and then use the Disk Manager in the Administrative tools post install to add/shape the remaining partitions. It does seem to me that you could possibly edit your boot.ini file to point Windows back to whichever drive you choose to boot from. I have done this in the dim past with some success. From your decription, Your old EM drive is/was your %SystemRoot%; and, it contained partitions c:\ and d:\. And, I read that your new SSD is now e:\. Am I correct? Otherwise, I am very confused! Duncan On 05/18/2013 07:03, Steve Tomporowski wrote: Understood that a fresh install will align everything for the fastest performance. However, Windows here just made sure that it loaded everything from the old drive. For some reason, it never bothered trying to load Windows from the SSD. On 5/17/2013 9:06 PM, Dave Gibney wrote: My laptop drive was giving me signs of eminent failure. I has a local guy install a SAMSUG SSD and clone to it. It worked, but I wasn't happy with all the results. The next weekend, I did a fresh install Win-7 Ultimate, Office 2010, etc. Cycling through all the updates and getting the drivers up to date took a while, but no real problems. It is much faster on boot and the quiet is scary :) -Original Message- From: hardware-boun...@lists.hardwaregroup.com [mailto:hardware-boun...@lists.hardwaregroup.com] On Behalf Of Steve Tomporowski Sent: Friday, May 17, 2013 5:48 PM To: hardw...@lists.hardwaregroup.com Subject: [H] The SSD and how Windows can make your life miserable Last weekend I cloned my main drive over to an SSD and then booted. Some things looked faster, but I wasn't blown away by the speed. I have found out why. It began on Patch Tuesday. 4 of 6 patches failed. Windows update threw some errors, but as I had a design review coming up at work, I was too buys obsessing about that to work on it. Today, a day off! I decided to look into the errors. Ran update again, same problems. Searching on the errors, it seemed to indicate that Update has a problem when you move stuff from C: somewhere else, like when you install an SSD. The only thing I really fudged with there is that I moved the Temp and Tmp folders. I moved them back, same problem. I wondered if I didn't do something else and forgot about it. Back to System and Advanced Settings. This time I looked a the lower half of the window. Half of my windows variables were pointing to my old boot drive which is now E: ! When I booted to the SSD the first time, I kept the old boot drive in the system, just changed the boot order in the BIOS. Wrong! Windows apparently got confused and I ended up with a mishmash.
Re: [H] The SSD and how Windows can make your life miserable
Okay, now I'm set. I re-cloned the SSD, removed the old boot drive and the SSD booted fine, no problems. All applications seem to work. Here's what I had to do: #1: Make sure that the data on the drive you are cloning will fit onto the SSD. #2: Don't use Win7's disk manager to resize the partition. Depending on the size, it always adds a buffer. I had 182GB of data, it refused to size it less than 266GB. #3: Don't use Samsung's Clone software if the source partition is larger than the target disk. Even if you don't have more data that the size of the SSD, it will fail. It will only copy over the same size or smaller partitions. #4: I used the free version of Marcium Reflect. When copying over, it automatically resized the partition to fit the SSD. #5: It will take a long time! Well, relatively, 182 GB took about 1.5 to 2 hours. #6: Before booting to the SSD, remove the old boot drive or Windows will try to use it. #7: I don't have UEFI bios, but my system automatically selected the SSD as the boot device. YMMV. #8: No, my computer isn't any quieter, the processor fan and the 2TB drive are still running. So far, so good. Applications do come up faster and yes, the boot is faster. There used to be a long lag from login to desktop where a number of things were going on, lagging things terribly. Now it takes about 10 seconds and everything will run fine. I need to do some picture scanning and then, tomorrow morning will be another cold boot. I don't expect any problems. Steve On 5/18/2013 5:51 PM, DSinc wrote: Brian, Thank you for the share, but, I have quibbles. para1: I will not have the benefits of UEFI bios until I upgrade my m/b's to my new Z77 models, along with their new i5-3570K cpus. I still run XP on P65 C2D m/b's. So, OLD BIOS. I did try to use AHCI in bios when I built these PCs. It did not work well at all. I backed off to ESDI and have run for the past 4yrs w/SATA EM drives and opticals. And, yes, I have never loaded/used my Asus/JMicron drivers. So, adding an SSD to my current PCs is confusing. Especially with what Steve is dealing with. para2: I assume that 'gpartd' is an open-source linux program. I do not haveit. I am Win-blows locked on XPpro. Yes, I do have Win7pro for my new(pending) Z77 systems. para3: Yes, I accept cloning sw to move old sw to new SSD. Yet I am not convinced that the cloning sw included with a Samsung Pro 840 SSD is completely solid, so I remain on the fence. Thanks again for your share, Duncan On 05/18/2013 11:14, Brian Weeden wrote: If anything things have gotten easier. I just built two new systems in the last 6 months. A lot of the tweaking needed to get a system running is no longer needed. UEFI is a lot better than the old BIOS. If you're installing Windows, it does all the partition stuff for you. If you want to do something creative or manual, I suggest getting a program called Gparted and putting it on a bootable USB or disc. If you are upgrading to a new drive, you need to use some cloning software to avoid the problems with changing the drive mapping. I just upgraded to a bigger Samsung SSD and it came with cloning software. Brian Sent from my iPhone On May 18, 2013, at 10:12, DSinc dsinc...@epbfi.com wrote: Steve, Thanks for the view of your conversion/installation. You have demonstrated my biggest fear of moving forward until I create a roadmap of How to... with what to use, why use it, what to expect. It has been 4 years since I have built a PC from scratch. I recall in the good-ole-days, we all used a program post Format to set a Primary, Active partition. All other partitions were set to Extended NTFS. Sadly, I have forgotten the name of this program and don't even know if I still have it archived. Now I just use the Windows install media to create (I believe?) the 'new' initial Primary and Active partition and then use the Disk Manager in the Administrative tools post install to add/shape the remaining partitions. It does seem to me that you could possibly edit your boot.ini file to point Windows back to whichever drive you choose to boot from. I have done this in the dim past with some success. From your decription, Your old EM drive is/was your %SystemRoot%; and, it contained partitions c:\ and d:\. And, I read that your new SSD is now e:\. Am I correct? Otherwise, I am very confused! Duncan On 05/18/2013 07:03, Steve Tomporowski wrote: Understood that a fresh install will align everything for the fastest performance. However, Windows here just made sure that it loaded everything from the old drive. For some reason, it never bothered trying to load Windows from the SSD. On 5/17/2013 9:06 PM, Dave Gibney wrote: My laptop drive was giving me signs of eminent failure. I has a local guy install a SAMSUG SSD and clone to it. It worked, but I wasn't happy with all the results. The next weekend, I did a fresh install Win-7 Ultimate, Office
[H] I contribute to the Windows Kernal. We are slower than other Operating Systems.
http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=74
