Ways to boost vista boot time? Without ssd or more ram?

[redwudz]

I don't think you would see a large increase in performance with AHCI, but I would still recommend it if the MB has it as an option. It's a real pain to add after you have installed the OS. In BIOS, it's usually there with the RAID selection under drive settings.

You are close enough to 50% at 63GB. You do have to monitor that the OS or newly added programs don't try to write too much to the boot drive. You can move some programs like the page file off to a different drive. I put my downloads and other more permanent large files on a different drive also. I also clean out my temp files from Internet Explorer occasionally.

Newer SSDs do a good job of managing themselves, so not really much maintenance required as long as you use a newer OS.

[yoda313]

thanks redwudz.

[yoda313]

I was wondering if this is a good idea:

http://www.hardwarecentral.com/showthread.php?182849-ReadyBoost-Has-Been-Disabled-Afte...35#post1044135

Should I disable superfetch and autodefrag?

I only have 2gb of ram and would like readyboost to make it that much better. Granted it feels great and responsive right now. However it says readyboost is disabled because the drive is good enough.

Please note I do have a standard non-ssd secondary drive on the system. If I do disable these features am I able to disable it for just the ssd and not the regular drive?

Thanks.

[nic2k4]

I've toyed with readyboost on win 7, I used a pair of Corsair USB 3 flash drives (20 MBps write/ 30 MBps read) and didn't see any improvement. According to this wiki, readyboost is useful for PC's with less than a GB of RAM and is disabled on PC's with SSD. I can tell you I could have bought extra RAM for a lot less money than what I paid for those 2 USB 3 flash drives.

As for superfetch, there's lots of conflicting talk on the web, Intel recommands disabling it with their SSD's, but all it does is preload program files you use often so the programs start faster. A good thing I would think. There's no negative impact on memory availability as it gets released to other uses as required. The only time you should disable it is when you're troubleshooting a system problem like a slowdown...

[fritzi93]

I have a netbook with 1 GB of RAM and mechanical hard drive, and as far as I can tell, readyboost didn't make one damn bit of difference. Though i can believe readyboost could have a beneficial effect if you have *significantly* less RAM than 1 GB.

As to prefetch/superfetch/defrag, I've read any number of comments to the effect that if you have an SSD, they're redundant at best. At worst, it's a matter of unnecessary wear on the drive. Your programs will load just as fast regardless. When I got my first SSD, I went through the same deal reading about recommended tweaks.

[yoda313]

So no problems if I turn them off then?

What about leaving it in for my other mechanical internal drive on the same machine?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[fritzi93]

On the two computers I have with SSDs, I replace Window defragmenter with Defraggler, and excluded the C drive. BIOS set to AHCI of course.

As to superfetch, it's turned off, indexing too now that I think about it. I don't remember now if I turned off write-cache buffer flushing or not (not recommended on an Intel SSD). I think not, I'd have to check. Since I have plenty of RAM, prefetch is on. Page file at a set size (not variable). All files like downloads, etc, on a data drive, not the SSD. Probably more too that I don't remember at the moment, but discussed in this article:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-performance-tweak,2911-5.html

As a rule, those SSD tweaks shouldn't be applied to mechanical drives.

[EDIT] Oh yes, system restore: I turned it off and image the drives weekly. System restore eats up space and if you're fanatical about limiting unnecessary writes to the SSD, there's that as well.

[Atak_Snajpera]

Do not buy Kingston v300 !!! New models have shitty asynchronous micron cells !
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ssdnow-v300-a-switch-to-slower-micron-nand

Look for something with toshiba 19 nm cells

[nic2k4]

What about leaving it in for my other mechanical internal drive on the same machine?

Read about what each program does, then you'll know if they impact performance for your second drive. What the second drive is used for matters i.e. if it's only a storage drive the files on it don't get accessed often and aren't likely to be pre-loaded by superfetch or readyboost. Also, we've already established that readyboost doesn't do much with over a GB of RAM. Even if you moved the pagefile to it, it doesn't get pre-loaded either. AFAIK, superfetch can't be selectively enabled and windows will turn it on or off as it sees fit. So if window's default behavior was to disable it when it found the SSD, then leave it like that.

[jagabo]

What about just using hybrid sleep mode? With my computers in S3 sleep power consumption is only about 10 watts. They wake in just a few seconds. In hybrid mode memory contents is also written to the hibernation file. So if there's a power outage the computer will be restarted from hyberfil.sys. That takes longer of course, but it's a rare occasion around here.