Vista on an SSD - OK or not ?

Tuvoc

Tuvoc

Tuvoc

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I've been doing some research on this. Vista does not support TRIM, but making sure scheduled defrags are disabled and moving the page file to the hard drive helps the situation. It would be a Crucial M4 120GB, and once Vista and all programs are installed, I would say 70-80GB would still be free. No more programs would be installed after that apart from Windows updates and other updates and service packs. That is, it would just be used as is.

In this situation, there should be little degradation in performance long term ?
 
illuz said:
People still use vista?!
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Sure, why not. I've always liked Vista, but then again I've always had good hardware. I was annoyed for a while with the large volume of hard disk activity, but after I replaced my drive with a quieter one, it was no longer an issue. Yes I have Windows 7 too, but I don't see it as a huge improvement. It is much better on lower end hardware than Vista, no doubt about that though. W7 flies on 4GB, Vista can be sluggish on 4B and needs 8GB in my experience to work well.
 
Why do that, why not spend the extra money and/or alternatively upgrade to Win7 or 8
 
Each to their own. Vista on an SSD shouldnt be a problem but you might need to load your motherboard chipsets disk controller during the installation. You are looking for the driver which supports TRIM. I think all the major chipsets have supported it for a while but its worth checking.
 
J.B said:
Each to their own. Vista on an SSD shouldnt be a problem but you might need to load your motherboard chipsets disk controller during the installation. You are looking for the driver which supports TRIM. I think all the major chipsets have supported it for a while but its worth checking.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip.
 
Tuvoc said:
Sure, why not. I've always liked Vista, but then again I've always had good hardware. I was annoyed for a while with the large volume of hard disk activity, but after I replaced my drive with a quieter one, it was no longer an issue. Yes I have Windows 7 too, but I don't see it as a huge improvement. It is much better on lower end hardware than Vista, no doubt about that though. W7 flies on 4GB, Vista can be sluggish on 4B and needs 8GB in my experience to work well.
Click to expand...

I prefered vista as well the ultimate version was quite good. One thing I noticed with it on high end pc was when booting up it was a bit slower to the desktop than Win7 but once there you did have to wait so long to access stuff.

I forget what its called but being able to use a video as wallpaper was fun.
 
Vista doesn't support TRIM.

I don't know how big an impact this makes.

This is one of my concerns too, since I'm about to swap the hard disk on a Vista laptop to a SSD.
 
This rig is running Vista on an SSD very happily. The advantage of an SSD is the complete anhilation of random access waits. Its not as fast to boot as my Win 7 box which also has an SSD (talking seconds here), but it does boot and operate quicker than a Win 7 box with a conventional HDD.

OCZ provides a manual trim utility if I can be bothered to run it. Crucial may do the same.
 
Had Vista running on an SSD until this weekend when I upgraded/changed to Windows 7 Ultimate. Had no issues with Vista and Windows 7 is performing pretty much exactly the same.

The Windows 7 install is smaller but apart from that I can see very little benefit.
 
Works fine assuming you had AHCI already set in the bios when you installed the OS - otherwise theres a hack for that you can google.

Use something modern to clone the drive (not just the partition) across to the SSD. Macrium Reflect or MiniTool Partition Wizard both work fine. I just used MiniTool which also does automatic alignment of the partitions.

If it doesnt work (cant find boot sector), or you get a bluescreen on boot, pop the old drive back in and come back.
 
Yes I installed using AHCI. I'm familiar with Minitool, thanks. I'll give it a go and report the result here. Could be a few days before the SSD arrives.
 
Vista+SSD is ok but W7 is much faster on an SSD the difference is night & day IME.

If your stuck with Vista disable all prefetching & disk defrag scheduling/services otherwise you will lose performance & wear your SSD out faster.
 
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