[wrjohnston91283]

I have a mini 9 that runs win 7 - every 5 minutes or so it will completely lock up. I can move the the cursor around, but nothing will "click" and applications say "not responding". Then everything will work fine after about 10 seconds.

I had no problems with this PC when it was running ubuntu on the stock drive, but i upgraded to a 16gb Super Talent (FEM16GFDL) when I installed windows.

Any ideas what my problems could be?

I have a Vostro a90 with a 16gb STEC drive that I want to install win 7 on as well - should i expect the same performance?

Would it be worth it to get a Runcore?

Thanks

William

[Thorsteenster]

I have a M9 with Super Talent SSD and Windows 7 Pro. After installing and doing some of the recommended speed tweaks it seems to run and boot slower.
Off the top of my head I'm not sure, but you can look through the Event Viewer in Administrative Tools and see if anything sheds some light there.

[holmes4]

My Mini9 with Win7 runs very well - better than XP. I have one of the original RunCore 64GB SSDs.

William, which AV product do you have installed? Some are better than others.

[grassle]

Flushing the ssd cache (=writing) causing the pauses?
If there's enough free space on the partition (or drive), data are written to empty blocks. If not, partially free blocks are read, the new data merged in, the blocks erased and the data written. Recommendations for free space go up to 20% (!) of the drive/partition. Also, file fragmentation has a strong adverse effect on performance in ssds in tight space conditions.

Your homework:
- Free space
-- manually delete/archive old stuff
-- there's more to throw away, use CCleaner, or similar tool
-- plus the hidden windows updates stuff. From a source I don't bother to google up right now but it served me well on XP:

on windows xp when you run updates it will download, save, but wont delete after the updates are installed....
First you must stop the automatic updates service (as it wont let you delete the folder) so go start > run > services.msc find the automatic updates and click stop
To delete the files go to C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution and delete the downloads and datastore folder.
And lastly. with hidden files and folders visible. go to C:\Windows folder and delete all the HIDDEN folders with $ sign in front of them (usually the very first ones in the list... these are all uninstalled, extracted, and files during updates that are also no longer needed.)
Should free up quite a bit o space if you have never done i

- If much of the ssd space is occupied by a pagefile and/or hibernation file, try turning off both (paging off only, of course, if you have 'nuff RAM, 2GB is worth the money!, and hibernation only if you can do without)
- Defragment (use Windows' tool, or Defraggler). Several runs may be necessary.

[eugene]

I always understood that you should not defrag. a Solid State Drive, are you saying that this is incorrect?

[grungysquash]

Originally Posted by eugene

I always understood that you should not defrag. a Solid State Drive, are you saying that this is incorrect?

Yes your right - don't defrag SSD's you won't get an improvement in read speeds, and moving data around the SSD will increase the write cycles and effectively wear out the SSD faster. The SSD uses a controller to manage the unwritten space on the SSD to ensure wear leveling occurs to try and manage the SSD spare space.

There can be any number of reasons why someones computer locks up every 5 min's - it may or may not be the SSD, it's also possible his computer has an infection, or is very low on space and his problem is self created.

[eugene]

Thank you Grungysquash. It's very difficult for a novice such as myself, to distinguish what is true from what is absolute nonsense in these forums. The consensus seems not to defrag. them though. Anyone from Dell awake?

[grassle]

Ooops, should have done some more homework myself...

[Vendeta]

I run windows 7 on a 32gb super talent. Works like a charm. I tryed it with windows xp a few times and it was slow and practically useless. Windows 7 ultimate runs great for me. If you have a valid windows 7 key and cd try downloading a tweaked version called windows 8 extreme it still will use your normal cd key and be valid for updates but it contains preformace tweaks already on it.

[grassle]

@Vendeta: Win7 does TRIM on ssds, XP does not. XP needs a CCleaner run (or something similar to that effect) once in a while when the ssd gets slow.
The Win7 formatting tool does partition alignment, the XP tool does not, so your setup may have been hobbled from the start (mine was). Here are someone's results before/after alignment. If you want to align, here's a good HowTo. (The defragmentation in step one is not necessary, gparted can resize/move partitions with fragmented files (at least for xp used filesystems). If you are curious to check for proper alignment, don't trust the 'align-check' command in parted, it does not return some exit values.)