The Stovebolt Site Forums The Back Office IT Short Bus SSD Drives...and a couple of other related things.

If you're a person who favors speed, efficiency and quiet computer operation, the SSD drives have come down greatly in price lately. I just bought a small (120 gig) drive yesterday for less than $18. That by today's standards sounds tiny, but if you're using a drive only for your operating system and support-type programs like Word, Excel, Acrobat, etc only and storing stuff elsewhere it is plenty. If you feel you need more, I'd suggest getting a 1tb spin drive for backups, etc and set it to turn off when not in use. That way it will be quieter and it will last a lot longer. And in line with this, thumb drives (USB sticks) have come down a lot also. MicroCenter is an excellent place to buy these (or any computer or part) and they're happy to sell online and ship. I've dealt with these folks for many years and give them a large thumbs up for customer satisfaction and competitive pricing. Here are some of their current USB drive (3.1 version) prices: 256 gig ($29.99), 128 gig ($12.99), 64 gig ($6.49). So you can use a smaller SSD drive and store anything sensitive on a USB stick on the cheap...very cheap, actually.

Having used an SSD drive for about a month now (I opted for the 240 gig drive which was $28), I heartily endorse it. Even with a sluggish program like Windows 10, it will boot up on my old computer in 30 seconds or so. Opening MS Word now takes me apx 2 to 3 seconds. I hear the fan cooling the case and power supply, but gone is the whine and chatter that used to be the hard drive. In ways it makes my 10+ year old dual-core seem like a new computer.

Plus...a big plus in my opinion...you folks using Windows 10 can reinstall it for free and without worry or hassle of validating the copy (as was required in the older versions). Today you just get a blank USB drive, download the Windows 10 installation media file (do it here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10). Back up anything you want to save, make a list of programs you'll need to re-install (you'll lose the old ones), install the new drive, make sure your PC is set to boot from a USB stick (you can go into "setup" when you first start the computer to determine this) and start it. It will take care of everything including some updates and it will contact Microsoft servers to verify you have an authentic copy of Windows 10.

What if I'm still using Windows 7 you might ask? You can do the same thing, but you will need to have your authentication number so you can enter it when prompted. It is pretty slick and if you're considering changing to an SSD drive, I would heartily suggest you install a nice fresh new copy of Windows rather than use the clone programs out there. Some are ok and some are in my opinion pure trash that will leave you with a copy of Windows that limps along and has issues and corrupted files. Not the path to greater speed and efficiency. My experience has been the Windows Troubleshooting programs can't solve these, either. Good luck. If you have questions, please let me know.

Hi Jon, good post but you made me laugh and I spit on my monitor when I got to the part of "a sluggish program like Windows 10". The only reason I'm adding comments to your post is that I'm bringing into my company the next new wave of computing which involves virtualizing all physical workstations. This system has nothing but SSD drives which are on the cusp of being obsolete to be replaced with 16 terabyte memory stick drives. I say memory stick because they look like the memory DIMMs you see in PC's today but each one holds 16TB of data and can be either hard drive space or used as RAM. We can spin up 50 Windows 10 Pro virtual machines in approximately 300 ms. Just 5 years ago a single 500GB SSD would cost upwards of $1,000.

As for staying with Windows 7 versus upgrading to Windows 10, since Microsoft no longer provides security patches for Windows 7, you are just asking to get infected or hacked. It is not a matter of if, but when. Plus it sounds like your 10+ year old PC is really why the new software runs so slow. The internal BUS architecture can't handle the multi-threaded needs of the new Windows 10 environment. My Surface Book II running Windows 10 Pro boots up and is ready to go in less than one minute.

Hi Bob,
I'm a fan of Linux. I tolerate Windows 10 because other people in the family use the computer, and Linux can be different until you get used to it. Please understand I'm not advocating staying with Windows 7. Personally I think that's like playing Russian Roulette and adding a bullet each time you cheat the odds, but some people seem comfortable with it. The 10+ year old PC? Well...it is paid for and despite limitations works ok. What is the cost of the 16 TB memory stick drives?

I agree with the "sluggish" comment about Win 10. The issue I have with it, is it wants to update all the time and you can't start to work until it finishes, even though it should update on shutdown. I can't imagine the man-years of wasted time for companies using Win 10 waiting for the stinking thing to finish updating. On initial install, the setup routine reboots the computer a number of times, so there should be one of the "geniuses" at Microsoft who could figure out how to complete the update on shutdown and THEN shut the machine off and avoid the wasted time on startup.
JMHO

Hi Jon,
I could tell you were leaning towards Linux and I certainly don't blame you. For those of you who love your MAC, same thing. Going on 40+ years of IT support, I have had to support a LOT of different operating systems as well as computers and associated peripherals. Kudos to keeping your 10 year old PC going strong as I'm right there with you. I can't seem to throw any of my old computers away including.... IBM PC Jr., Apple II se, Amiga 1000, Compaq 286/386/486, original Compaq 286 Portable, Surface Pro/Pro 1/Pro2/Pro3, Dell Inspiron, Dell XPS, a Gigabyte Cube and a MAC Mini. Half of those are currently on and the other half "should" work when I put new CMOS batteries in (I hope). I have DOS6.22, Windows for Workgroups, WinXT, NT4.0, Win7, Win10, Centos7.
We don't know what the cost on those 16TB sticks are just yet but they are going to make the SSD's seem slow. Plus it will still be several years before anything on the home market will be able to make use of those.
Oh, I did lose my one and only Gateway 1000 when a lightning strike blew out the power supply conveniently after the warranty expired. All of my electronics are protected by surge protectors because of that oversight.

Hi Kevin,
The complexity of those upgrades compounds itself to a level that make you really wonder how anything gets done. If your company had 10,000 PC's that were 100% identical then the upgrades would be the least intrusive. But Microsoft has to take into account all of the hundreds of different vendor products and how each vendor driver interacts with other software elements before and after any of those upgrades. As people are quick to point out, hackers love to pounce on Microsoft as quickly and painfully as possible so with every upgrade there are doors (ports) opened that were not intended to be opened so they work non stop to close those loop holes, memory leaks, bugs or sometimes just bad code creation. I too get irritated when I want to shutdown my laptop so I can leave work only to see the message, "Update in progress, Do Not Power Off your machine"... The best you can do is mess with your update/reboot schedule to maybe only occur during your lunch break everyday. What really bothers me is there is no way to tell what is being downloaded when they are doing their upgrades. All I can see is there is traffic coming in sucking all of my country hick ISP bandwidth which really makes it hard to watch all those really cool YouTube videos which I call, "YouTube Hell".

Hi Bob, Kevin...
Linux appeals to me for many reasons and one of those is the control issue. Nobody can do anything to my computer unless I grant them permission. That to me seems very logical. Same reason I lock my doors. Each successive version of Windows has become more bloated, more arrogant, less workable, less user-friendly and that is also one reason I like Linux. Some of the distros work about like a cafeteria letting you pick and choose. I still have a Toshiba laptop with a Pentium IV processor and it still runs fine with TahrPup 6.0. If that laptop had the ability to accept more than 2 gig of RAM, it would be better...but it doesn't. Still I can't bring myself to discard it. I still have DOS 5.0 around here somewhere and I still remember working in the basement of the business building at NTSU (now UNT) writing programs and making punchcards. It was freezing down there all year long and the computer was about the size of a VW bus. And those women you had to give your trays of punchcards to. Had to be really nice to them or they'd take one card out of sequence and put it somewhere and there you go. Bigtime fever. Well, time for bed now. Take care...

I've got to join the I hate WIN10 chorus too, LOL. I'm running it on one of my machines, an older HP desktop and I'm only running WIN10 on it because one day long ago when I was younger and dumber I accepted MS's offer of a free upgrade to it once it became available.... One day I had a flawlessly working WIN7 machine and the next day a slow, unpredictable machine that wouldn't run 2 apps I constantly used...... It must have passed MS's hardware test since it upgraded but IMHO it's performance indicates it was either borderline or somehow cheated on the test LOL..... It takes forever to boot up and I've actually counted to 2 minutes before it would run a program after being taken off of the screen saver. Unfortunately I waited too late to revert back to WIN7 and keep all my data so Iive with it...

My main machine is a Dell WIN7 laptop that is currently sporting a new HDD. Since it does run the 2 apps I run the most I stayed with WIN7 on the HDD swap. Those 2 apps I run don't require the WWW for the majority of their usage so it may stay WIN7, we'll see....
I thought long and hard about an SSD drive but the new Toshiba 500gig HD only ran me $25 and free S&H so it won. The original went 7 yrs of constant use so I can live with it.

I've got another machine, an HP mini with an SSD running WINXP that I use for yet 2 more apps I use that wouldn't run on either the WIN7 nor WIN10 OS's. I do a little side work on the more mature friends of mine home networks and it comes in handy for testing wireless and pinging around LOL. It also runs my bore scope.... Other than testing it doesn't see much WWW time so I'm not overly concerned about it's now extinct OS.

I also have an old WIN98 eMonster sitting on the shelf but it doesn't get any usage now. Who knows it may be called into service after the nuclear electro-magnetic pulse, LOL...

Good thread, carry on.

Hi Volfandt,
Please consider getting an inexpensive SSD drive (Amazon has a 480 gig drive listed for something less than $50), install it and then have a brand new copy of Windows 10 installed as I mentioned in my first post. I don't know why but the Win 7 to Win 10 "upgrade" (if anyone considers it an upgrade) doesn't work as well as a virgin installation. I've noticed after having a new copy of Win 10 installed on the SSD that it seems to hang up less frequently, run smoother and be more predictable. Now, please don't take this as an endorsement of Win 10. It isn't. It is more like saying "my new Yugo exploded the first time I started it and the one they gave me as a replacement has only caught fire a couple of times so far today."

The wife came home with a laptop with Win10 on it. After two hours of trying to get anything to work we took it back and are happy as hogs in doo-doo with our old Win7 machines. I realize our time with Win7 is limited but when I'm forced to "upgrade" to Win10 the first thing I'm doing is having the shell put on it that makes it look and act like Win7. I'm not a complete neophyte, my first computer had Lotus Magellan as an operating system. Having said that I've not been keeping up on the tech end of things for a few years so a lot of the stuff now is greek to me. Color me a 70 year old dinosaur who hates Win10.

Well then I guess I'll be the only Windows 10 Pro fan in a sea of upgrade fails, Win7 & Linux lovers. However, I'm not going to try and convince any of you to change your ways cuz I totally respect your positions with what worked for each of you. there was a time that I would get into heated debates over what was better but I guess I'll borrow a line from one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs, "I used to care, but things have changed..." There are reasons why each of your failures caused so much pain and anguish and believe it or not it wasn't because of Windows 10 being designed poorly but more that it was a complete change in architecture. Now I do realize that I am totally biased since I am still providing IT support so its in my best interest to "try" and keep up with all the latest, greatest gadgets and doo-hickeys so I just accepted the Win10 challenge and the touch screen concepts grew on me. While most of you are way ahead of me in restoring/rebuilding your Stove bolts, and I've seen a lot of really nice ones here in this forum, I am aching to get the time to spend on mine. I know that once I retire I will be more than happy to leave all the high tech crap and problems behind. I will leave you with this one fun thought.... Linux was developed by a poor Finnish Computer Science student who loved UNIX but couldn't afford the steep price. Hence the beginning of the whole Open Source effort. Linux took off like wild fire and all the Microsoft Haters were determined to put Bill Gates out of business. Sadly though all Linux did was kill Solaris and UNIX. We used to have nothing but UNIX and Microsoft Servers. There are no more UNIX servers anymore as they have all been replaced by Linux servers but Microsoft is still running strong.

Two of the hardest things I've learned are patience and that everyone doesn't think like me, LOL.

Back when I toiled for The Man, I spent a good portion of my time installing and servicing voicemails. The 1st ones ran on MS DOS and weren't too bad for your basic VM. We had to build batch files to run at 2am that would stop the VM app and boot up in DOS, run scandisk, then defrag then boot back up to the voicemail program afterwards. Generally once a week would clean it up but real busy ones had to run nightly.

The OS then changed to OS2 Warp, yeah I know, but believe it or not it was very stable and no batch files to defrag were needed. A reboot generally fixed it up when it would start doing freaky things.... They went to that OS to enable multi tasking so the VM could integrate with the LAN and do screen pops & email integration among other geeky things.

The last VM OS change I was involved with was to Linux OS which was also pretty stable. I was learning my way around it when I transferred to transport and didn't have to mess with VM's & PBX's anymore.
You don't use it you lose it....

I know I'm also on borrowed time with WIN7 but being on the downhill slide of life I figure I'm on all kinds of borrowed time , LOL.

I'll keep the preloaded SSD with WIN10 in mind for on down the road, good tip. But right now I'm enjoying working with something I know my way around and don't have to think too much to run it , LOL.

Dave

This is very interesting until I got really lost. I was reading it in the wee morning hours and I didn't have pen and paper to take notes. And this is an old thread. When it comes to tech, it is VERY old ... me thinks.

So what is the new thinking on this stuff. My computer is very slow to do almost everything. Are SSD drives still something to consider?

A modern SSD will give you a speed boost for drive read/writes. If you look at your performance manager, you can see of that is your bottleneck.

The problem with current drives is that they are TLC/QLC based, so the long term data reliability is sketchy at best and as you read/write cycle it or fill it beyond about 50% the speeds will drop off dramatically and it will end up slower than a decent spinning plate drive.

If you can find an old SLC drive, those are great.

Hit me up on email or pm if you want to discuss in more detail.