[ta101]

I originally installed XP with SP2 on the Dell factory 8GB SSD drive with 1GB memory and the Mini 9 operated fast and I was happy for a couple years. But I wanted more drive space. So, this week I upgraded to 2GB memory and swapped out the old SSD for a Super Talent 32GB (FEM32GFDL), and installed Windows 7 Ultimate and now the Mini 9 is clearly slow and takes like 90 seconds to really clear the start up process verses like 45 seconds for XP, and the response to clicks is a lot slower than XP.

I need some help here. What's the deal with SSD Trim on these Mini 9's? This Super Talent I bought looks like it does not support Trim, and it looks to me that my Dell Mini 9 does not support ACHI, so what do all you folks recommend for putting in a new SSD with Win 7 and have a SSD setup that keeps the SSD empty spaces cleaned up?

Also, in RegEdit I could see that the install of Win 7 did not set EnablePrefetcher and EnableSuperfetch to 0, I had to do that my self and I'm wondering exactly what benefit I got from going to Win 7 which was supposed to be faster than XP but on this system will end up running really slow if I cannot get Trim or something to keep the SSD clean.

Please jump in on this. Thank you.

[holmes4]

Even if the SSD supported TRIM, as you note, the Mini 9 can't run the controller in AHCI mode so Windows 7 won't give you automatic TRIM. I've noticed my two-year-old RunCore seeming to be more sluggish, though the tests I've run don't indicate a problem. If I could do a Secure Erase and restore, that would help, but it seems the RunCore doesn't support that either.

[ta101]

I'm going back to XP, which is faster and simple enough to meet my requirements. Do you think I should try a Secure Erase or something, (defrag, format, ??) to wipe the drive from the Win 7 Ultimate install before I delete the partition and install XP?

[holmes4]

No, just format. But XP isn't going to be any better for you in the long run, and perhaps worse, as Win7 knows about consolidating writes to SSDs.