Solid State Drive (SSD) Optimization Guide for Windows 7, with Caution

Engadget shared a SSD optimization guide that seems to be worth checking out if you are a fan of SSD. I am but I still can’t afford to buy one of these nice little guy for my humbling laptop. Anyway, the optimization guide contains 8 pages of good information, especially the introduction and the controller [...]
Solid State Drive (SSD) Optimization Guide for Windows 7, with Caution

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Engadget shared a SSD optimization guide that seems to be worth checking out if you are a fan of SSD. I am but I still can’t afford to buy one of these nice little guy for my humbling laptop.

Anyway, the optimization guide contains 8 pages of good information, especially the introduction and the controller breakdown pages that provide some good information explaining the SSD’s basics. The guide also has chunk of suggestions specifically for Windows 7, not only because it’s a popular OS but also

the first mainstream operating system that supports TRIM. TRIM allows the OS to pass this deleted file information down to the SSD controller, which otherwise would not know it could trash those blocks.

Very good to know.

While the guide has some good recommendations for properly using SSD on Windows 7, we also would like to point out that some of the suggestions are misleading when it comes down to performance optimization.

First of all, it’s not necessary disabling Defrag service unless you only use SSD on your computer.

Disk Defragmenter has become a service in Windows 7 and is running under the control of the task scheduler. Windows 7 is smart enough knowing not to defrag the hard drive that is SSD. If you disable the Defrag service you are actually turning off the defrag to all hard drives, which isn’t a very good idea improving the overall performance.

Secondly, it’s a bad idea disabling Superfetch

And here is the reason why we don’t like this idea, at all.

Also, Prefetch, the technique Microsoft has used since Windows XP, has been superseded by the Superfetch, so making the change to the registry mentioned in the guide may cause negative impact to the Superfetch.

And, if it worth it disabling system restore?

I understand the reasons behind this action that you can save some of the hard drive space and gain a little bit speed at the same time. But the fact is that you are also losing the ability that can save your system from the bad crash. Without the restore point that this System Restore saves, you are going to spend a lot of hours fixing the bad crashes that may come to you one day down the road.

However,

This optimized guide is still worth the time reading, especially if you are planning on getting on for your Windows 7. It’s just that reading them with the cautions that we mentioned above.

Final tip, if you have the room for having 2 hard drives in your computer, you don’t actually need to buy a SSD that has large capacity. 64G is good enough in most of the cases. Why? Because you only need SSD to run your operating system. Save all your data to your secondary SATA hard drive instead of your more precious SSD. And don’t forget that you can change your user profile from C to your secondary SATA storage.


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