Windows 7 RC on a 32GB CF card SSD

[sjthinkpader]

I had a 8GB RiDATA 233x CF card running Windows XP on a X40. It was too small to run anything else other than a browser. So I bought a 32GB CF card from Newegg for $76. It is a RiDATA 233x CF card.

Since I read that Windows 7 have improved interface to SSD, I install Win7 on this 32GB CF card in the same X40. Reading thru the various web articles and postings, I was able to do the following:

1. Turn off Defrag.
2. Turn off Superfetch
3. Cannot find anything about Readyboost in my computer. I assume it needs a PCIe card for this to be present in the system.
4. Cannot find anything about TRIM. I assume this needs to be in the card or SSD CIS. Since I have a relatively "dumb" CF card; Win7 cannot positively identify that it is a flash card and the card itself has no TRIM function support.

Any help or comment with the above. Anything else I can do?

The computer feels pretty fast and I am typing on it now.

[ssd_thinkpad]

Congratulations to your ssd notebook. In my opinion, the x4 models are next to the x6s models the best on the market regarding small form factor. For speed improvements, I'd turn off indexing, too. The mlc type ssds on the market today greatly benefit from having free space - the more the better. I am not sure if this stands true to cf ssds. 32 gb are pretty much for an office only computer, anyway.

[sjthinkpader]

Thank you for the comments. Yes, I did turn off indexing. Page file had been set to 0 bytes. At the moment it is about 25% used. I have been playing with it and it is pretty fast.

The other item is that Win7 RC has no native intel GMA 855 GPU driver. So it is running on 8MB internal video memory because it does not have the software to share main memory.

[godling]

Readyboost should not have any impact on your system, if you were able to initiate it, as the technology is meant to leverage flash memory for the bootup process, and your main drive is now comprised of flash memory -- therefore, no performance improvement with it on.

TRIM probably won't work w/ CF cards, though I'm not certain. They usually don't have all the tech built in that SSDs do, at least last time I researched them (quite some time ago).

I've also been told to keep the pagefile on, as long as you're not low on space. You can set it to a limited amount, of course, to decrease the impact on your CF card, but the concept applies and in fact works even better with flash based main drives.

This is what I've been told.

-Jon

[sjthinkpader]

Yes, I inserted a WinXP image on SSD without page file into a computer with 128MB RAM and all hell broke loose.