G40 with CF card, Windows XP.

[Medessec]

I'm pretty certain it's because I've never done this before, and I did something wrong, or bought the wrong adapter.

But i've bought this adapter:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/130711596406?ss ... 1439.l2649

mostly because it's US shipping, so I could try this out early. I plug it in, and sure enough, Windows XP setup picks it up and straight away installs XP on it, no apparent issues at all.

After booting into XP for the first time, startup was painfully slow, it took a couple of minutes. Keep in mind the machine in question is a G40 with a 2.6GHz P4, startup time was mostly dependent on the CF card and adapter. XP the notified me I had no page file memory, and that I should set it to a higher value or check hardware. I had 768 MB RAM installed(256MB stick+512MB stick)... and I decided to change some settings, restart, and see what happened. After getting past the bootscreen again, the computer just froze at the logon screen, I let it sit and after 15 minutes, it actually loaded the desktop, but the computer was completely unusable.

To determine if the CF card/adapter setup was the issue, I removed it, installed a typical 80GB IDE 5400RPM HD, ran XP setup, then ran XP. Works like a charm, actually very fast, and very impressive performance.

So it's definitely the CF card/adapter being the problem. To see if it was the adapter, I went ahead and bought one of these: http://www.ebay.com/itm/310468771533?ss ... 1439.l2649

The CF card I bought is this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/120983415116?ss ... 1439.l2649

I understand the CF card I got will not provide stellar read/write performance in contrast to a conventional Hard Disk, the main point was merely to try the setup out and see how well it worked.

So-will the new adapter I'm getting work that much better? I noticed it has a lot more features than the other adapter. Is there anything I might be doing wrong, or something I should know?(That I don't know.)

[schen]

Yikes! That's one area I rarely if even get cheap on. CF are performance vary WIDELY! Maybe it's because I do a lot of photography with digital SLRs, but I almost never use anything, but the high-speed models Sandisk or Lexar. Maybe a Transcend or Ridata every now and then, but that's it.

[twistero]

CF cards are generally optimized for sequential read/write, and often have terrible performance for small, random read/writes. They often do not have cache, either. Given that Windows XP likes to do a lot of small writes here and there, its performance is generally quite bad on CF cards. If you're feeling adventurous, you can try transplanting EWF (Enhanced Write Filter) from Windows XP Embedded to a normal XP installation to improve performance. It's a trick used by a lot of carputer enthusiasts.

[Medessec]

Hmm... alright. I may have to try that to see if I have any luck. I'm kinda hoping to at least achieve usable performance from the hardware I've got- before I think to buy more expensive hardware. But I guess I can understand that the only way I can achieve usable performance is by buying expensive hardware... in which case I may just streamline the process and buy a proper IDE SSD if I ever want the performance.

[schen]

Hmm... alright. I may have to try that to see if I have any luck. I'm kinda hoping to at least achieve usable performance from the hardware I've got- before I think to buy more expensive hardware. But I guess I can understand that the only way I can achieve usable performance is by buying expensive hardware... in which case I may just streamline the process and buy a proper IDE SSD if I ever want the performance.

Back in the SSDs in the "nose-bleed" price days, it was a viable option to do SSDs. However, in today's sub-$1 per Gb SSD world, it's just not worth the effort and dealing with the issues. If you watch the ads carefully, for Newegg, Micro Center and Fry's a 64Gb SSD can be had for close the the $50 range. Personally, I've almost completely switch all of our computers over to at least an SSD boot drive. Only the kids have the mechanical drives in them. I just bought one from another Forum member for $52 to do our bedroom HTPC.

[Medessec]

Yeah-SATA SSDs in particular are hitting amazing values-I managed to pick up a Samsung 64GB SSD for $45, which I had in my beefy Toshiba gaming laptop for awhile, but now I have in my T60p. I bought an OCZ 60GB for the X60T I have, and I'm seeing Kingston bring their 64GB SSDs down that low too-I saw one guy selling them for $50 I believe. I agree, I think this is the time when if you really can deal with the lower space, or can possibly accommodate a secondary/slave conventional HD, it's the standard to just get an SSD.

From what I've seen of IDE SSDs though... it's not particularly the same story, I've been finding 16GBs very cheap, but not 64GB. I'd like to get one to try in the G40, but probably after I get some more spending money.

[twistero]

You can always buy a smaller form-factor SATA SSD, and use it in conjunction with a SATA-to-IDE adapter.
Using 1.8 inch microSATA SSDs has been discussed quite extensively here: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=106749
More recently, mSATA-to-IDE adapters like this one have appeared on the market: www.ebay.com/itm/280952757843 mSATA SSDs are basically SATA SSDs in mini-PCIe form factor. They should be more future-proof than 1.8 inch SSDs, since mSATA is quite widely used in current laptops.

[Medessec]

That actually doesn't sound like a bad idea to get more GB for your moneh. CF cards are outrageously expensive for higher capacities, and usually compromise speed and features in reaching feasible sizes(16GB, 32GB).

Update: I have made another discovery though-Microdrives. People have apparently had luck using those-they boot and run Windows a tad bit slower than normal HDs, but are much less tricky to work with than CF cards since they're made specifically for OS/program running application. Better yet-because of that caddy-styled adapter I recently got that allows for a second SD card, I'm going to put the 4GB Microdrive I got in the Primary CF bay, and the 32GB CF in the Slave bay, install the OS on the Microdrive and see how that turns out. I'll hopefully report back.

Only thing is-Microdrives are actually what they say they are-they're mini Hard Disk Drives... which kinda defeats the point of the SSD/Flash aspect of using a CF card, but... whatev. This is just an experiment.

[twistero]

Do keep in mind, though, that Windows XP onwards will not install to a "removable" device without a fight. Many CF cards and microdrives are marked as "removable" even when installed in the hard drive bay, and some extra tricks must be used to install Windows on them.

[automobus]

Consumer Windows on a Microdrive is slow. Is not just "a tad bit slow". It is unacceptable even for a patient person. Embedded Windows might be fine, and a "Live" or "in-memory" OS (such as Puppy, DSL) are suitable. But not regular releases of Microsoft Windows. Microdrive idle spindown timer is ten seconds or so. Which means every occasional seek will take ten seconds, rather than ten milliseconds. Installing the OS might take five hours on a Microdrive, but about one hour on a regular always-spinning disk.

Even the slowest CF card, has zero spin-up time. A Microdrive is a cheap way to store lots of documents. Its cache is good for writes. Consecutive reads, to load an entire filesystem into memory, is fine. But it is not a good choice for Windows, who makes reads for all sorts of little reasons.

[Medessec]

hmm... well, I've actually had the chance to try a friend's CF card, he has a SanDisk 8GB. It's not a hi-spec one, but it's a good brand, so I figured I had better luck. The OS loaded a bit quicker at first, but the same issue persisted where XP booted at first, although terribly slow, then notified me that there was 0MB Page file. Programs and attempting to use Windows ran terribly slow or didn't work at all, and rebooting just left XP stuck at the welcome screen.

So I've had 0 luck with CF cards thus far... But I understand there could be numerous factors to this, such as the adapter i'm using, and the OS. I've got two different adapters, a typical $2 one, and the one that makes a full 2.5" caddy, with more features. Both have produced the same results with the same CF card and XP.

i'll try a different OS I suppose, but the Microdrive is mostly to see if the CF card is the device playing the most in this dilemma.

[Neil]

If you're feeling adventurous, you can try transplanting EWF (Enhanced Write Filter) from Windows XP Embedded to a normal XP installation to improve performance.

I was feeling just that, and decided to give it a go on my X40 that boots XP on a CF card. I followed the installation instructions of alix-box.info and I think I was successful, because this X40 used to take as much as 10 min. to boot and 5 min to shut down. Now I'm booted to a usable desktop in about 45 sec., and shut down is ever faster. But I have a couple of questions:

1) The instructions read, at one point; Alter the permissions on one registry key. Navigate with regedit to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\Root.
Right-click on Root and click "Permissions". Set the permissions to "Everyone" to have Full Control and then merge the file by double-clicking on it.

I did all that...but don't know what file they are saying to double-click to merge. Can anyone here be more specific about that?

2) Now that I've got EWF installed, every time I boot, I get the Windows was not properly shut down...do you want to start in Safe Mode...etc., with the "Start Windows Normally" option highlighted. Every time...whether Windows is shut down normally, restarted normally or whatever else. It's always there now. Anyone have any ideas about what caused that?

[twistero]

Neil,

I assume you're following this guide? http://www.alix-box.info/wiki/index.php ... Windows_XP

1) My guess is that they're referring to EWF.zip available on that page.

2) See the "hint" on that page.

Also, remember that any changes made to the protected drive will be lost after reboot unless you "commit" the changes.

[Neil]

Thanks for the input twistero. Yeah, my guess was the EWF registry file too, and it's at that point that I double clicked it because I didn't see instructions to run it at any other time.

And thanks for pointing me to the "hint"...guess I didn't read far enough down the page.

Now that I've read to the bottom of the page...I'm lost what is meant by the stuff under the heading "Most important EWF options". Guess I'm going to have to play around with those commands and see what happens.

[twistero]

See my reply in the other thread: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 60#p691660

Also, these are useful reads:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms940186.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms940853.aspx