SSD in T60 WinXP - no boot time improvement

[Theuyas]

I'm trying to upgrade a T60 for some relatives. The machine is running Windows XP. (Of course, they'll have to move to Win8 in the near future, but they aren't tech savvy so any change is not viewed fondly.) I'd like to get it to boot up faster for them, so in the spring I tried to upgrade them to an SSD. It didn't improve the boot time at all, unfortunately. I'll be seeing them again next week and wanted to try again, and so I'm looking for any advice anyone could give me on doing a better job than I did last time.

More details:
They used the machine with the stock drive for the first few years. I partitioned it into C: for OS+programs and D: for data. (Partitioned so that I can take an image of only their data away on an external hard drive when I see them every so often, not for performance). I then upgraded them to a hybrid drive (Momentus XT) and they had quicker boot times and quicker launching of programs. After some time, they had some problems with that drive, so they reverted back to the stock drive. Move forward to this past spring, and I tried the SSD. I followed the process in the FAQ here (http://thinkpads.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=94795), booted up ... and no boot improvement. After about a dozen reboots over a couple days with some usage in between: still no improvement. Harrumph. I got frustrated/exasperated/annoyed, popped the stock drive back in, and shelved the project.

So I think I'm going to give another crack at it next week. Any advice?

[Cigarguy]

If you can load Win Vista, 7 or 8. XP was a great OS but its good days were in the days before SSD become popular so it's not the most SSD friendly.

First go into BIOS and switch the SATA mode to AHCI.
Second do a fresh install. I prefer Win 7 myself which aligns and set up the SSD beautifully and automatically. A little more work is required for XP (Google search).

I have 4 T60 myself. Each with at T7200, 3 GB RAM (which is max) and a SSD. Maxing the RAM is an improvement. However, the biggest improvement was the SSD. It's way faster than a HDD. I too have 3 Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives. These were an improvement over a HDD but is still significantly slower than a SSD.

[dr_st]

I'm looking for any advice anyone could give me on doing a better job than I did last time.

Teach them that they don't have to boot and reboot their computer more than once every few months. Standby/Hibernate are plenty good enough.

[rumbero]

I'd like to get it to boot up faster for them, so in the spring I tried to upgrade them to an SSD. It didn't improve the boot time at all, unfortunately.[...]
So I think I'm going to give another crack at it next week. Any advice?

It would be helpful if you would at least also detail which particular SSD drive you were trying to deploy in this machine.
Not all SSD's are worth being taken into consideration, and maybe the particular drive model you used was one of those which should rather be avoided?

[hhmcsv]

I'm looking for any advice anyone could give me on doing a better job than I did last time.

Teach them that they don't have to boot and reboot their computer more than once every few months. Standby/Hibernate are plenty good enough.

So I tried to follow the good advice. I noticed in the above discussion the total absence of numbers in the discussion on boot-times.
In my story on boot-times on my T60, I seem to remember, that with W7 and the old HDD (7200rpm), the boot-time was about 80 secs.
Now, with SSD (a slow one since T60 only supports SATA1) and Win 8.1, boot time is about 17secs. And with the above suggestion of using Hibernate, I'm up and running in 13 secs

[Theuyas]

Thank you all for taking the time to reply. I'm grateful for your advice.

Cigarguy: yes, I intend to install Windows 8 on it sometime in the late winter (before next April). I'm just hoping for some discounted pricing (eg Black Friday). Maybe I'm wasting my time doing the SSD with XP before that but it seemed like it shouldn't have taken much to get it to work.

dr_st_ that is good advice. I have tried to encourage standby, but I'm not there often for frequent reminders and old habits are hard to break. And even then, the system gets a little uncooperative when using standby too many times without a reboot.

rumbero: the drive is OCZ Vertex Plus R2 VTXPLR2-25SAT2-60GB 2.5" 60GB SATA II. I know that the Intel and others are highly rated, but this wasn't one of the earlier buggy OCZ versions, at least according to the reviews. And I understood that even a "slow" SSD would be far faster than a HDD (ie http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sat ... 110-8.html)

hhmcsv: thank you for the encouraging example. I don't have the boot times handy--though I did document them--and will see if I can dig them out. (No longer relevant, but to give a rough idea: with the now-gone Momentus XT, the difference between the first time booting with that drive and the fifth decreased from about 50 to 35 seconds, and total time until Firefox was run on startup decreased from 85 to 55 seconds. That drive is not in the equation anymore, and the stock HDD they're using is slower; I'm hoping that the SSD would be even faster than the hybrid Momentus XT.)


A couple more details: the system has 4GB memory installed (though 1GB not available to XP). I'm more of a power user than a real techie, but I did do a good bit of research before doing the SSD install ... which was why I was so frustrated that it didn't seem to accomplish anything.

I'm hoping that there is something obvious that I missed causing the SSD not to improve the boot times?

[Johan]

@ Theuyas:

Just a small hint here; you may perhaps in a not-so-distant future need to consider upgrading this T60 (if remaining in service?) from XP... reason being that Microsoft is terminating their support of XP/SP3 in April 2014... see e.g. the thread Adding an SSD to a T60 ("implicitly pointing to" the thread XP Installation on T60). Edit: Aah, sorry - I now see that you're already aware of this (my error, not reading slow enough before posting... how embarrassing! )

PS: A hint; check how much (potentially: Practically unnecessary/outdated!) stuff is being autostarted when this T60 is booted; use e.g. the free Sysinternals/Microsoft tool: "Autoruns for Windows" (Google and you'll find it!).

PS2: Is/was your T60 XP-SSD partition aligned? This might have a (although probably relatively small) impact on the boot time...

PS3: Some time ago (one year? two years?) there was a free boot-optimization tool, "Soluto", which gave good information about the boot time of individual components - maybe worth to try? It is described (the 2010-version) e.g. here.

Johan

[rumbero]

the drive is OCZ Vertex Plus R2 VTXPLR2-25SAT2-60GB 2.5" 60GB SATA II. I know that the Intel and others are highly rated, but this wasn't one of the earlier buggy OCZ versions, at least according to the reviews. And I understood that even a "slow" SSD would be far faster than a HDD (ie http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sat ... 110-8.html)

I already feared that you bought anything else than the proven good models recommended most on this and other forums. One can't go wrong acquiring only known good drive models, such as mostly Intel, Crucial, and Samsung SSD drives.

In this and other forums, OCZ has never been part of any recommendation, but rather to the contrary. While i have no personal experience with any OCZ SSD drive myself, based on the predominantly negative fame OCZ has earned themselves in the past, i wouldn't want to even only touch one with a 5 meter pole for this very reason.

Furthermore, it is a well known phenomenon that smaller capacity SSD's tend to be noticeably slower than their larger siblings, and this is even regardless of brand used. You should have made sure to get an SSD drive with at least twice the capacity. I have made very good experiences with various 128 GB Samsung SSD's.

I'd suggest to not waste any more time and just return that OCZ drive, and rather get something like a 128 GB Samsung 840 instead, which is a drive held in high esteem by most people here and also other forums. If you mainly bought this due to lower price, don't forget that you usually only get what you pay for. And sometimes one has to even buy twice to learn this lesson.

[Cigarguy]

Nothing wrong with that OCZ drive so long as it works. I have 4 myself and each is working flawlessly. OCZ was an early adopter of Sandforce 11xx and 22xx controllers which was very very buggy. Sandforce is mostly to blame for releasing a premature product. During the first year after 22xx's release every drive from every manufacturer suffered from random BSOD until finally, mercifully, Sandforce released a stable firmware. To this day I avoid Sandforce controlled drives on principle along. I do not like being used as their guinea pig.

In my experience a misaligned drive will be slowed significantly. However even a misaligned drive will still be faster than a HDD unless there is other issue(s). My one and only experience with installing XP on a SSD drive was problematic, drive was not aligned, SSD mode set to IDE not AHCI, and a lot of bloatware as I cloned instead of a fresh install.

[ajkula66]

The aforementioned OCZ sports an Indilinx controller and is actually a pretty decent SSD in my experience. I've deployed probably a dozen or so of them without an issue.

Having said that, I've never been a fan of XP on SSD, regardless of the machine in question. I have yet to see an install which doesn't suffer from sudden freezes and slowdowns.

I'd strongly suggest wiping the drive and moving to W7...for a slew of reasons. Then tweaking it to get the most performance/lifetime out of it.

My $0.02 only...

[ZaZ]

Any advice?

I ran XP on my R60 with SSD for a while and it was noticeably faster. I'd guess something is amiss. If you're looking for proper alignment you can use a Windows 7 disc to make the installation partition, which you can down here, and will align the partition correctly, but you'd need to use a XP install disc for the installation, not the recovery discs.

[Tasurinchi]

Having said that, I've never been a fan of XP on SSD

Neither do I

I'd strongly suggest wiping the drive and moving to W7

+1 here
Since you already spent some money on the SSD I suggest to grab a Win7 license, they can be found for a small amounts nowadays. You'll get a much more stable and faster system that works wonderfully with a T60...

My 2 cents...