[Montala]

Originally Posted by MoInSTL

It's done for performance. Did you read the link in nd4spdbh's post right above yours?

Yes I did thanks, but I didn't see any specific reference there to Windows 7.

According to the OCZ Forum, this procedure is NOT necessary (at least under a new installation of Windows 7) on their Vertex series of SSD drives.

[bjd223]

Originally Posted by Curious

I tried Readyboost on a usb stick, and on the SDHC card and didn't notice any difference. The reason is that Readyboost is supposed to take advantage of the low random seek times of flash instead of the slower mechanical hard drive. Thing is, the drives in our Minis are already flash-based.

Readyboost, in our case, will only take up space without increasing speed.

If your SSD is fast enough Windows will actually tell you Readyboost will not help performance in the tab where you normally turn it on. I get this on my desktop as I have some SSDs in raid 0. How it determines this, I do not know. It may also depend on how fast your Flashdrive is at random IO. As some SSDs still have problems at small random IO.

[bjd223]

Originally Posted by Montala

Sorry for being a bit thick, but I don't quite understand why you should have to 'align' a system partition, or indeed what you are actually alighning it with?

Unless of course we are talking about an SSD which is going to be set up with a 'dual-boot' option... but if not, I am sure that someone will explain further!

Aligning the partition, as it applies to conventional HDDs is when you tell the partition to start its first cluster at the very start of a full sector. If you do not do this then many of your clusters could span 2 or more sectors. Meaning your machine would need to read (and then later write) 2 or more full sectors to change only one cluster. This adds overhead which is more noticable on SSDs as they do not like small random writes. Aligning tries to reduce the amount of sector reads and writes at a disk level.

As it applies to SSDs you do the same thing, except you want the clusters to match the block size of the SSD as best as possible. Since SSD blocks are typically larger than one cluster, many people stay with multiples of 64.

The reason that this problem exists, is because Windows XP uses 63 instead of 64. Which throws off every boundry on the disk (which could make writes 2x-3x slower in some cases!). If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7 to create the partition it will align it automatically. Windows XP is the only OS that 'requires' alignment.

Anyway unless you are using Windows XP to create the partition don't worry about it.

[nd4spdbh]

i will say this does apply to windows 7... i installed win 7 and it aligned my partition at 63 sectors. now i will say that i was messing around with partition in the win 7 install so maybe by default it will do a 64sector offset but mine didnt... so just check when you get your system up n running.

needless to say i ended up aligning to 128sectors (64KB) as per this huge ocz thread

Guide Partition alignment importance under Windows XP (32-bit and 64-bit)..why it helps with stuttering and increases drive working life. - OCZ Forum

[bjd223]

Originally Posted by nd4spdbh

i will say this does apply to windows 7... i installed win 7 and it aligned my partition at 63 sectors. now i will say that i was messing around with partition in the win 7 install so maybe by default it will do a 64sector offset but mine didnt... so just check when you get your system up n running.

needless to say i ended up aligning to 128sectors (64KB) as per this huge ocz thread

Guide Partition alignment importance under Windows XP (32-bit and 64-bit)..why it helps with stuttering and increases drive working life. - OCZ Forum

The key is you have to let Windows Vista/7 installer create the partition, not just install too it. So you should delete any exist partitions and re-create them.

When I got my new Runcore 32GB T-Style HDD I assumed it would be aligned, and I was wrong. After installing Windows 7 I double checked it and it was set to 63. It also had a runcore .exe file and some other file, which I guess is for drive cloning?

Either way I should have deleted that unaligned partition and created a new one before installing....Whats another re-install I guess.

And you are correct the OCZ forum is a good place for info on this type of stuff. I have been a member for a little while and remember when this was found to increase performance, the place was going crazy.

[nd4spdbh]

ya by default win 7 will make a 100mb partition for certain things before the actual windows install partition... i didnt want that so i made one partition in the win 7 install partitioner... and it DID NOT align to 64 or 128 sectors... so just make sure you align. simple as that.

[Albertane]

The Firefox preference disk.cache.memory.capacity is supposed to be browser.cache.memory.capacity. You probably don't need to change it either, the defaults should be fine. It's only used for caching images so they don't have to be decoded again. By default, the size is automatically adjusted based on the amount of system memory you have.

See here for documentation:
browser.cache.memory.capacity - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

Another good tweak that you didn't mention is to disable thumbnail caching in Windows Explorer. This will stop Windows from writing thumbs.db files all over the place. Here's how:

- Click Start
- Type "gpedit.msc" and press Enter
- Local Computer Policy -> User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Explorer
- Double-click "Turn off caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files"
- Click "Enabled"
- Click "OK"
- Close "Local Group Policy Editor"

[satyr]

Overall, a good (let's say) "article", I mean there's a lot of good info in it (esp. for newbies), however, I have a few problems with it (i.e. things to add and/or correct):

Originally Posted by Curious

Configure Superfetch
Description: Frees up RAM by not preloading program files.
Instructions: On second glance, I would recommend leaving this one alone. However, there are some customizations that you can follow in the post below.

Hmmm, sorry, but this one is totally ridiculous. Prefetching in Windows works totally differently (i.e. there is no "preloading of files"); you only need to look into one of the *.pf files in "Prefetch" directory, and see what data these files contain. I mean it's quite obvious that they don't "preload" anything, but they rather just contain a list of directories, OS-libraries that a respective executable loads (or maps/hooks) when executed with regard to the device (i.e. the hard-disk/volume on which these files reside), that's where "Layout.ini" file comes into action.

So you see, a prefetch file is only a some kind of map (containing references to files which a respective executable loads on launch), if you want to also see Ed Bott's article titled "Windows Expertise: One more time: do not clean out your Prefetch folder!" for more info about this.

With "totally ridiculous" I am referring only to the part of text that says that disabling it "frees up RAM". It's true though that having it enabled causes writes to SSD now and then, but perfetch files are usually just a few kBs in size.

/EDIT: And one more note: all this above (my explanation of how it works etc.) regarding prefetching applies only if Superfetch in Windows 7 is not completely different thing than prefetching in let's say Windows XP.

Originally Posted by Curious

Firefox - Use memory cache instead of disk cache
Description: If you use Firefox, there's a way to write cached files to RAM instead of the hard disk. This is not only faster, but will significantly reduce writes to the SSD while using the browser.
Instructions: Open Firefox -> Type about:config into the address bar -> Enter -> double-click browser.cache.disk.enable to set the value to False -> Right-Click anywhere -> New -> Integer -> Preference Name "disk.cache.memory.capacity" -> value memory size in KB. Enter 32768 for 32MB, 65536 for 64MB, 131072 for 128MB, etc. -> restart Firefox

Nothing important really, just wanted to note that "there's a way to write cached files to RAM instead of the hard disk" sounds a bit strange, because if you set Firefox to only use RAM, there are no "cached files" at all (and certainly no "cached files written to RAM").

By the way, other related user-prefs (that is if you want to disable disk caching) in "prefs.js" or "user.js" files are the following ones:

user_pref("browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl", false);
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", false);
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.enable", true);

Note that by default these do not exist so you need to add them by yourself manually.

Originally Posted by Curious

Disable the Page File
Description: Eliminate writing memory to the SSD, free over 2GB of disk space. Warning - If you run out of memory the program you're using will crash.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Settings (Performance) -> Advanced Tab -> Change -> Uncheck Automatically manage -> No paging file -> Set -> OK -> Restart your computer
Alternatively, if you want to play it safer, you can set a custom size of 200MB min and max.

Actually, I rather keep a small fixed-size pagefile (I only have 1 GB of RAM), however, I needed to set it up like this by myself. What I want to say is that by default there was no pagefile on my Dell Mini 9.

Finally, also see the "No pagefile by default on Dell Mini 9?!" thread here on MyDellMini, and optionally also the "No pagefile by default on my new netbook, is this OK?!" one on forum on ArsTechnica website, that I opened about this.

[MoInSTL]

In all fairness, the original info goes back to January and the prefetch info was challenged right away.

[satyr]

Originally Posted by MoInSTL

In all fairness, the original info goes back to January and the prefetch info was challenged right away.

Uhhh sorry all, I've totally missed that (the date of this thread's creation), plus I must confess that I haven't read all the pages, so yes, I believe you that the info about prefetching was "challenged" (as you've put it into words) in a post on one of the thread's pages that I haven't read.