Help with computer problem

36 hour ordeal and the computer works again. it also cost me $250.



Manton said:

I am ambivalent, it seems to run better but it is not intuitive at all. I mean, I can get to the desktop, which is good, but not having the start menu truly sucks.

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http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/ ...and there's quite a few other Start menu thingies for Win8

Thanks.

You a particular fan of any of them?



Manton said:

Thanks.

You a particular fan of any of them?

Click to expand...

Classic Shell. It's free and highly customisable.
http://classicshell.net/

I may try this. I do miss the start menu. I have a phobia about messing with the OS, though.

Overall, Win 8 is clearly better than 7. I am just annoyed at all the changes they make to make it more "user friendly." It's not, really, it's just dumbed down. But it runs better, faster, and more smoothly.

Anyone gone ahead and installed their OS on a solid state drive? never heard of this but the salesman at the computer shop was very into it. Sounded interesting. I would have to reinstall the entire system again, which would suck, but supposedly it makes everything run much faster.

128 GB drive is like $100. That easily holds Windows 8, firefox, Word, and whatever other applications one likes to run. Then you put all your data on conventional spinning hard drives.

Yep, on all my machines. It is the single biggest performance improvement you can make. Highly recommended.



aravenel said:

Yep, on all my machines. It is the single biggest performance improvement you can make. Highly recommended.

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+1

All of our new laptop hard drives at work are SSD now. They are encrypted so the boot up time is much faster with SSD. Recently purchased a laptop for home use and Dell had it listed as Windows 7 but they sent it loaded with Winblows 8. I'm ordering a SSD from Newegg and OEM copy of Windows 7 and will just start over using the DVD bay for the SSD and OS, apps and page file. I dual boot into Linux also.

SSD is probably the best and most revolutionary advance in computer technology in terms of price/performance of the last decade.

Do some research to ensure that you're getting a stable SSD controller and update the firmware if you can. Most of the manufacturers sites will have the steps and files to do this.

The difference in speed is incredible. Also ensure that you download an SSD utility that will change your settings to be maximized for SSD (no page filing, no hibernate mode, etc).

It really is remarkable. I'd gladly take a much slower CPU to get an SSD for just about all uses.

is the firmware the same as the bios? I do have the latest for my machine, though it's about two years old. I checked.

This is sounding a bit more complicated than I thought. I'm still interested, though.



Manton said:

is the firmware the same as the bios? I do have the latest for my machine, though it's about two years old. I checked.

This is sounding a bit more complicated than I thought. I'm still interested, though.

Click to expand...

Firmware is sort of like BIOS, but specifically for the SSD. Usually you can update the SSD firmware through the OS. Just do it as a slave/secondary drive with your HDD still running the OS before installing the OS on the SSD.

Make sure the BIOS of the Motherboard has the SATA setting as AHCI (usually default on modern boards) and not IDE.

well I definitely have SATA, that I know.

What I would do is simply remove the current C drive so that all the computer "saw" as I reinstalled the system is the SSD drive, which would be the new C drive. No risk of mistakes there.

So, you are not talking about a driver, then? This is software for the SSD that must be installed BEFORE the OS goes on?

This is sort of exciting, I had not really planned to do this, was just noodling it, but I now may do it this weekend. I did get a new graphics card this past weekend which is really zippy. Processor is an i7 960 3.2, so that is fine for now. Does not seem to be much point in upgrading, to get one much better will be like $600, $300 buys just about the same power. The computer is two years old and prices just have not come down fast enough, at least not on processors (the certainly have on graphics cards, though, the new card is WAY better and was less than $200.) Unless I just don't know how to judge processors, which is possible, Intel offers so damned many and differentiating them is not easy if you are not a true tech head.

He's talking about the controller on the SSD drive itself I believe. Installing the actual drive should be fairly plug-and-play--just pop it in and move forward with installing the OS via the DVD.