Good rule!
A few friends of mine have done it and noticed significantly decreased load times and o
I remember I installed my SSD when I bought it, did a fresh install and didnt know about the AHCI thing and did a restart script test, average was 42sec. I just changed it to AHCI and now my restart time is 30sec which is pretty beasty.
Just for those stumbling across and maybe this might help someone here, if you don't know theres a fix for AHCI without reinstalling/reformatting. Probably old news to you people but was handy for me.
**KEY STEP** Make sure you have a sata drive!
**KEY STEP**
Step 1): Make sure you know where and how in your BIOS to change the sata config from IDE to AHCI
Step 2): Load into Windows (I believe this is the same route for Vista as it is Win7), start button, type "regedit" and press enter
Step 3): Find: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci
Step 4): Right click the file in there called "Start" and hit Modify, change the value (mine was 3) to 0
Step 5): Now reboot and load into bios, find that satacontroller/config section and change it to AHCI, save and exit
Step 6): Let it load into windows, if you didnt change the last step correctly you'll get a loop of BSOD, reboot, BSOD, windows will now automatically install all the drivers. You can view the progress by opening the new flashing icon (looks like a pc tower with a green light) and it'll tell you what its doing and how far its got, then when all are ticked and ready, reboot again.. and load windows.
No need for a fresh install and its a quick 5minute fix!
Apologies for the dumbed down version but if you're like me and you stumble across a forum post you want it to be as informative and as helpful as possible. I absolutely hate finding posts that only give half the information and I'm too lazy to search for the rest.
Right now, I'm not sure what you'd do if you didnt check if you could switch to AHCI so make sure you know how to change it in the bios otherwise you're probably looking at a fresh install.
Alternatively if you're going the fresh install route you can leave it set as AHCI in the bios and the windows install will detect it. It doesn't pre-install the drivers if you install set to IDE which is the cause of the looped BSOD.
and no, like I found out in a trial by fire.. it doesn't matter if you have a SSD main drive and a HDD secondary you can run both in AHCI, including the DVD player.
