Reinstalling Windows on an OEM laptop

[andyroo (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by iceman

I'm interesting in finding out more about this.

There's a load of SSD's here: http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?...&cPath=210_902

How do I know which ones are compatible with my Toshiba L650D?

Yeah there are loads, sorry that link was meant to go here:

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?...ducts_id=19276

If you look here:

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?...h=210_902_1221

You will see of the intel brand there are two main series, the 520 and 320 series.

Basically the 320 are the first generation of SSD's and are capable of around 300mb speed.

The 520 are capable of more like 500mb per second. The 320's are being phased out, so go with a 520.

60GB is enough for most people, but I'd strongly suggest the 120GB which I linked above. For $200 you will have a beast of a laptop!

I prefer Intel, they are slightly more expensive, but the difference is very minimal (say about 10-15%+ in price), but it's worth it for the better quality and warranty.

As above any SSD will work with your laptop. These days the main connector type is Serial ATA, or SATA. Your laptop will be SATA. The old connector types PATA, haven't been used in laptops for years, like 5+ years old.

Windows will detect it as a normal Hard drive and install normally. It doesn't care what technology the hard drive is made of, as long as it stores 1's and 0's.

If you want something slightly cheaper then this is the one I have in my desktop PC:

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?...ducts_id=17369

And as above it too would work fine in your laptop. Let us know how you go!

[iceman (Mike)]

Originally Posted by andyroo

Having a 'smaller' C:\ drive is actually a good thing, because it will force you to store your data on an external drive, which you should then backup again depending on how serious you are. I have a 120GB ssd and then a 1TB in my desktop.

I can see this will be true in a desktop, but I can imagine it being quite frustrating on a laptop. 120GB used to be more than enough in the 'old days', but it's amazing how quickly it gets used up these days.
It's really frustrating having to plugin in an external HDD to move stuff in and out every day.
I'd have to store my 200+ GB of photos on an external drive and then copy across the 'set' I'm working on onto the SSD so I can process it faster, then when I'm all done, copy it back onto the external drive.

If it just ran off USB power it'd be ok, but most of the big ones need external power which is a pain crawling under the desk etc

Originally Posted by andyroo

You could remove the DVD drive on the laptop (get a cheap external USB drive) and then you'd have space for a larger normal mechanical drive, if you wanted in the future.

I'm not sure what you mean here??

[iceman (Mike)]

Originally Posted by andyroo

Yeah there are loads, sorry that link was meant to go here:

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?...ducts_id=19276

If you look here:

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?...h=210_902_1221

You will see of the intel brand there are two main series, the 520 and 320 series.

Basically the 320 are the first generation of SSD's and are capable of around 300mb speed.

The 520 are capable of more like 500mb per second. The 320's are being phased out, so go with a 520.

60GB is enough for most people, but I'd strongly suggest the 120GB which I linked above. For $200 you will have a beast of a laptop!

Thanks I'll get the 520 120GB.

[iceman (Mike)]

Originally Posted by iceman

It's really frustrating having to plugin in an external HDD to move stuff in and out every day.
I'd have to store my 200+ GB of photos on an external drive and then copy across the 'set' I'm working on onto the SSD so I can process it faster, then when I'm all done, copy it back onto the external drive.

If it just ran off USB power it'd be ok, but most of the big ones need external power which is a pain crawling under the desk etc

I had a look on pccasegear while I was there, and USB powered external HDD's have come a long way since I last bought one that was only 80GB capacity.

I just got a WD 1TB USB powered, so I don't need to plug it in to power.

[andyroo (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by iceman

I'm not sure what you mean here??

Sorry what I meant was, if you want, a good solution to make up for the smaller C drive space, is to replace your DVD drive with a normal mechanical drive, like the one you currently use for your C drive. (If there's nothing wrong with it you may as well just use it).

So you get one of these:

http://www.newmodeus.com/shop/index....roducts_id=462

Then just remove the DVD drive, and put this in its place, it's basically a caddy to hold the mechanical hard drive. So you will have your SSD as your main OS disk, then have the old C drive as your data disk, for storage.

Say you could get this:

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?...ducts_id=18060

That way, you would have 120GB for your OS and programs which will be super fast, but also the 1TB internal disk will be very quick because it will be connected via SATA, as opposed to having a USB2 connected external drive.


But see because you have a 1TB internal, then you could use the 1TB external as a perfect device to backup your 1TB internal.

I hope this makes sense, and yeah maybe you are spending a little money but it's worth it to have a good backup, because your time is worth more than a few hundred dollars!!

The only thing you lose in this situation is your DVD drive, but seriously how often do you use it? They are becoming obsolete so rapidly. Any software you want/buy etc is downloadable these days and Like I said if you really need you could just get an external USB DVD drive which are like $20 on ebay.

Here's a picture I drew:

http://imgur.com/TFoo8

[iceman (Mike)]

Originally Posted by andyroo

Sorry what I meant was, if you want, a good solution to make up for the smaller C drive space, is to replace your DVD drive with a normal mechanical drive, like the one you currently use for your C drive. (If there's nothing wrong with it you may as well just use it).

So you get one of these:

http://www.newmodeus.com/shop/index....roducts_id=462

Then just remove the DVD drive, and put this in its place, it's basically a caddy to hold the mechanical hard drive. So you will have your SSD as your main OS disk, then have the old C drive as your data disk, for storage.

This is great!

I can use the current 250GB drive initially, and get a 1TB one a bit later (when funds recover).

So i'll have 120GB SSD, 250GB internal, and 1TB external via USB for now.

That'll keep me out of trouble for a little while.

Though it's taken about 30 hours so far to copy about 240GB to my other laptop across the wireless network. So damn slow!
I've got to copy it back too, once I've rebuilt everything. Another 30 hours!

[Poita (Peter)]

Cable the two laptops directly together and it will take less than 1/10th of that time!
Plus you probably aren't going to copy all 30GB back, or is that 30GB of actual documents and pictures etc?

I now no longer have any laptops with internal DVD Drives, I have an SSD boot drive and a 750GB internal drive as my standard setup, and use an external DVD drive for the very few times I need one.

You won't know that machine, with 8GB of RAM and a SSD boot drive, it will absolutely scream along.

[iceman (Mike)]

How will the SSD affect battery life? Better or worse than a mechanical drive?

[OzRob (Rob)]

Originally Posted by iceman

How will the SSD affect battery life? Better or worse than a mechanical drive?

They use less power so battery life will be longer.

[iceman (Mike)]

Just what I wanted to hear

[andyroo (Andrew)]

As the other user said you should just wired network for this occasion, you can connect them via Cat 5 cable, either PC to PC or, use your wifi router as a switch.

But anyway no SSD don't use more battery life. Also mechanical drives only use power if they are spun up, which if you set it in power settings, means that even though your going to now have two hard drives, the secondary data drive will only be used when required, like a dvd drive that it replaced.

So no you shouldn't see any worse battery life, except maybe because you will use it more. It's a myth about old SSD drives, also because they generate heat, but if you do bench tests they dont use any more than traditional drives.

[iceman (Mike)]

Well the SSD has arrived.

I've downloaded Win7 64bit ISO and created the boot disk on a new 4gb USB. I had an issue creating the bootsect from a 32 bit machine but found a 32bit bootsect and was able to get it working the second time around.

I've backed up everything, I think

So tonight/tomorrow I'll replace my HDD with the SSD, put in the USB and boot off it to re-install Win7 as 64 bit.

My new RAM hasn't arrived yet, and neither has the case for the SATA drive which will allow me to put it in the DVD slot, but I can still re-install Win7 as 64bit on the SSD for now and put in the new RAM when it arrives.

Wish me luck!

[iceman (Mike)]

Well I'm up and running again.

The SSD installed easily, haven't got the new RAM yet.

Installing Win7 x64 off the USB worked flawlessly, until I rebooted it and found I couldn't connect to the router and no display drivers either.. I guess that's the benefit of using the Toshiba BIOS re-install - it has all the drivers with it.

So I had to use the other laptop to get on the Toshiba website and download the drivers I needed, copy them to USB and then install them on my laptop.

Then it's been installing all my programs again and starting to copy the data I need back off the other laptop.

Almost back to normal, still a few programs to install but the SSD is definitely faster.

All on a morning when IceInSpace was down and I had to go out.. busy morning

[iceman (Mike)]

Next update.

I've spent the last few days installing old programs again and getting my local web development environment up and running for IIS and other websites I've done.

First problem I found, was the 30GB on the main C drive was not nearly enough. Windows itself chewed up about 18-20GB, then by the time I added Lightroom, Photoshop and other programs (not their data, just the programs!) I ran out of space trying to install Microsoft Office.

And this was after I'd already allocated the 80GB of the 120GB SSD to the D drive. So I had to re-copy the D drive contents to external HDD, format the D partition and unallocate it so I could re-allocate an extra 20GB to the C drive.

Now I have about 53GB on the C drive with about 7GB to spare, and everything is now installed. Although I'd be in trouble if I tried to re-install the CoD franchises

My data drive (D) only has 58GB and it's already full. The iTunes library is 30GB on its own, so I haven't been able to copy on any photos yet. I barely fit the Lightroom library (~6GB).

So now I'm waiting for the casing to be able to mount my old mechanical drive in my DVD drive bay to allow me to free up a bit of space on D and put my pics and music on the other drive.

One consequence of re-installing is that the DVD driver seems to be busted, even though Windows recognises it, and *some* CD's can be read - it won't recognise Office or some other CD's or DVD's. I've got around it by sharing the DVD drive on the other laptop.

I'll have to get a USB DVD drive soon though.

And good news, got my 8GB RAM today and of course it went in easily.

So I can't wait to try out PS and LR. I've definitely noticed the increase in speed in general running of Windows with the SSD hard drive. It's so quiet too! The laptop does feel fresh again. I love it. It needed a good cleanout too.

120GB SSD is really too small for most purposes though. They'll have to increase capacity soon

Oh and I did spend hours trying to get MySQL, PHP and Apache working properly. Permissions problems, Windows UAC and other annoying things.
Then I finally installed WAMP and wow what a breath of fresh air. I wish I installed it years ago The Wordpress and modern sites worked fine immediately, but the IIS platform is old and requires an older version of PHP and changes in the php.ini which screwed me around for a while. All good now though.

There's my update.

Thanks to Andy and others for their help and advice in this thread. It's been much cheaper than a new laptop and I actually look forward to image editing, not like a week ago when it was a very painful experience.

[supernova1965 (Warren)]

Hi Mike,

I often install programs to the second partition or a second HDD if they are large you get a chance to change the install location during setup.

Glad to see you are back up and running.

[Barrykgerdes]

Changing partition size on the fly is no problem with programs that do this. The free (trial version) of Easeus will do this without bother. I use Partition Magic but it does not work on win7. Acronis makes a good image for later making images and restoring. I use drive image but it also does not work on Win7

I regularly need to increase and shrink partitions. Windows XP now needs 60 GB to handle my home video assembling.

On My win7 platforms I always make an image of the installation on a backup disk. Delete it. Install windows XP (FAT32) on the primary partition in 40GB (with the image recovery program). Then using any Win 7 disk start the install of win 7 on the second partition (60 GB NTFS) as a new installation (not upgrade). This will install the BCD startup screen. When the install stops for the want of a key you can then restart Windows XP and and copy the Win7 image back to your new partition. Works every time for me.

I then have what is left of the hard drive to store any programs that are common to both systems, drive images, tools etc.

Barry

PS windows can always install new copies of later systems but you can't install an earlier system if there is an existing later system.

[andyroo (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by iceman

Next update.

I've spent the last few days installing old programs again and getting my local web development environment up and running for IIS and other websites I've done.

First problem I found, was the 30GB on the main C drive was not nearly enough. Windows itself chewed up about 18-20GB, then by the time I added Lightroom, Photoshop and other programs (not their data, just the programs!) I ran out of space trying to install Microsoft Office.

And this was after I'd already allocated the 80GB of the 120GB SSD to the D drive. So I had to re-copy the D drive contents to external HDD, format the D partition and unallocate it so I could re-allocate an extra 20GB to the C drive.

Now I have about 53GB on the C drive with about 7GB to spare, and everything is now installed. Although I'd be in trouble if I tried to re-install the CoD franchises

My data drive (D) only has 58GB and it's already full. The iTunes library is 30GB on its own, so I haven't been able to copy on any photos yet. I barely fit the Lightroom library (~6GB).

So now I'm waiting for the casing to be able to mount my old mechanical drive in my DVD drive bay to allow me to free up a bit of space on D and put my pics and music on the other drive.

One consequence of re-installing is that the DVD driver seems to be busted, even though Windows recognises it, and *some* CD's can be read - it won't recognise Office or some other CD's or DVD's. I've got around it by sharing the DVD drive on the other laptop.

I'll have to get a USB DVD drive soon though.

And good news, got my 8GB RAM today and of course it went in easily.

So I can't wait to try out PS and LR. I've definitely noticed the increase in speed in general running of Windows with the SSD hard drive. It's so quiet too! The laptop does feel fresh again. I love it. It needed a good cleanout too.

120GB SSD is really too small for most purposes though. They'll have to increase capacity soon

Oh and I did spend hours trying to get MySQL, PHP and Apache working properly. Permissions problems, Windows UAC and other annoying things.
Then I finally installed WAMP and wow what a breath of fresh air. I wish I installed it years ago The Wordpress and modern sites worked fine immediately, but the IIS platform is old and requires an older version of PHP and changes in the php.ini which screwed me around for a while. All good now though.

There's my update.

Thanks to Andy and others for their help and advice in this thread. It's been much cheaper than a new laptop and I actually look forward to image editing, not like a week ago when it was a very painful experience.

Glad it's running better. And once you have the DVD HDD caddy then you won't have to worry about space. If it were me I would leave the entire C:\ use 120gb, you will need more room for programs/files you are working on. Stick everything else on the mechanical- itunes etc, which I think you said you were going to. Music doesn't need SSD speed! Technically you could install itunes to C:\ then direct the library to the other drive- that way the program will run much better on the SSD but the music will be on the mech drive. 120gb is plenty for OS+programs etc. Everything else can go on cheap attached storage. But in a few years 512GB ssd will come down to say $200.

But the good thing about a small C:\ drive is that you can easily clone the disk and stick it on an external, which means say if the SSD dies or something else happens, you can just reimage the new SSD! It might take a few hours to learn how to do it, but think of the time you save rather than having to do it all from scratch.

If you have windows 7 professional then you can disable UAC and other annoying things in secpol.msc, but I'm guessing you've already figured that out too.

The SSD will help somewhat with image editing- if the images are on either the SSD or the internal SATA mechanical hard drive.

Let us know how your photoshopping goes!

[iceman (Mike)]

My HDD DVD caddy turned up yesterday, and that was installed without drama.

Just a question about page file - it's currently on my C drive and Windows has allocated 8GB. With 8GB of RAM, do I really need a page file size that big?

[supernova1965 (Warren)]

Originally Posted by iceman

My HDD DVD caddy turned up yesterday, and that was installed without drama.

Just a question about page file - it's currently on my C drive and Windows has allocated 8GB. With 8GB of RAM, do I really need a page file size that big?

Generally the page file is equal to or double the physical memory so yes this is correct.

[mithrandir (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by iceman

My HDD DVD caddy turned up yesterday, and that was installed without drama.

Just a question about page file - it's currently on my C drive and Windows has allocated 8GB. With 8GB of RAM, do I really need a page file size that big?

A page file on SSD is not a good idea. The continual rewriting will reduce the drive's lifetime. Either turn off swap completely or tell Windows allocate it on your disk in the caddy. 1.5 to 2.5 times actual memory is usual for swap, and allocating at a fixed size stops disk fragmentation.

With a fixed swap and memory hungry programs (64 bit ones in particular) Windows may start complaining you have run out of memory. Then you need more RAM, but the 8GB you have maxes this one out. When you have large slabs of memory being paged to and from spinning disk it will slow response dramatically, at which point putting swap on SSD and reducing its lifetime might be an acceptable tradeoff.

If you want to be able to hibernate the lappy you also need enough disk space for a bit more than the amount of physical RAM, over and above any swap space.