How to make your laptop 300% quicker..

re: How to make your laptop 300% quicker..

Martin Woodward — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:29:39 GMT

I'd be interested in hearing about any tweaks you would make to Win2008 / Vista to get the best out of SSD. For example disabling defragmentation or other such services, running and SSD spindle as the C: drive and a traditional HDD as a secondary drive that sort of thing.

I'm running Vista on my little Atom powered netbook and loving it - however I went for a traditional HDD at the time because the performance gains for SSD at that time were not so significant. Now that a new generation of SSD devices are coming online and pricing are coming down it is getting more and more tempting...

re: How to make your laptop 300% quicker..

daven — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:56:46 GMT

Hi Martin.

Well SSDs are new to me too - so I'm still learning. As far as I know they don't need defragmenting.

I am going to be putting an SDD in as my secondary drive (but it has to be IDE - so it will have to be an old one - not as fast as my OCZ one). I'll do some tests that compare my existing 5400rpm secondary drive and my SDD when I get it.

I could go back down the external drive route (using SDD) - but my goal is my small(ish) light laptop, with no extra stuff that I can forget and/or lose.

I also put 8GB of memory into it yesterday (2x4GB DIMMs) - no impact on performance, but that will let me run twice as many VMs (hopefully - SDDs willing)...

Windows Vista Performance (the sequel)

Dave Northey's Blog — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:04:59 GMT

Windows Vista with SP1 (and some tweaks) is faster than Windows Server 2008. Since my last post on this

re: How to make your laptop 300% quicker..

Neil — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 13:23:30 GMT

Dave I have the SSD for a while and they are the digs when it comes to performance. Especially when you take into account all the disk thrashing that vista enjoys doing. I am curious though of the 8GB memory that you specify. Is this a 32 bit machine and if so how can you make your VMs see it. We share goals where laptops are concerned :)

re: How to make your laptop 300% quicker..

pc forum — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 20:18:53 GMT

Great post, explained really well and I could really understand. Thank you.

Building my Demo Laptop (Part 1)

Dave Northey's Blog — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:06:26 GMT

It turns out that how I built my demo laptop is generating a bit of interest.  These posts have

re: How to make your laptop 300% quicker..

Zac — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:19:53 GMT

Dave, I've been searching all over for someone who did NOT install their OS on the SSD but used the SSD only to host one or more Hyper-V virtual machines. The only info I come across doesn't seem to be setup even close to that. Actually, most people have completely unorganized statistics which I literally have to assume what their actual configuration is. Do you either have any information or somewhere you can point me to?

Thanks,

Zac

re: How to make your laptop 300% quicker..

daven — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 21:47:59 GMT

Zac, I don't have anywhere to point you to I'm afraid. I do run my VMs from a SSD by the way. I have a second SSD in the DVD bay of my laptop, but it had to be IDE, so it's not a quick one (it is quicker than a spinning disk though). I currently have 11 VMs doing all their reads for Windows from it - I have differencing drives for each VM on two external USB drives (more info here: http://blogs.technet.com/daven/archive/2009/01/12/building-my-demo-laptop-part-2.aspx).

Dave

What the hell?

A210-MS4 — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:52:46 GMT

That doesn't mean your laptop will be 300% quicker. First of all: it varies of the components inside the computer, Next of all: it's not possible.

I tried running Far Cry (which is a PC games) on my internal 5400rpm drive and after on my external USB 2.0 7200rpm drive.

People on the internet said that because it doesn't use USB, the internal harddrive is 5 times faster. Is it true? Not at all. It's like 1/4 faster.

re: How to make your laptop 300% quicker..

emma — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:52:17 GMT

i dont now how to use it you idiot