Upgrading to a Smaller SSD
The biggest hassle of upgrading our laptops to a Solid State Drive in place of their hard drives had been the need to reinstall Windows and all our applications. The SSDs are generally smaller than even laptop hard drives and Windows 7 disk imaging software will not let you restore a drive image to a smaller drive, even though the portion of the old drive that was actually used was much smaller than the new drive, e.g. you can’t restore a 40GB image from a 250GB hard drive to a 64GB SSD.
Intel has a utility that comes free with their SSDs that will transfer a disk image to a smaller SSD, but as Intel SSDs were about 50% more than the Kingston models I have used, I looked for another solution.
I found the Paragon Migrate OS to SSD application which accomplishes this task with little fanfare, but also for only $20. I used it in our latest SSD upgrade and it worked flawlessly within about one hour. $20 was a small price to pay to avoid an extra two plus hours of reinstallation work.
SSD Not Panacea for TouchSmart TX2 Speed Issues
Having had considerable success installing Kinston 64GB SSDs in two HP laptops at our house, I thought I would install one in our TouchSmart TX2 laptop that has been slow to boot at whose disk access light seems on quite often.
The results have been considerably less impressive than those with our other HP laptops. After installing the new SSD, I can now boot, logon and get to a MyYahoo web page in about 2:40. That is probably a little faster than previously, but is not the dramaticly faster boot time I got with the other laptops. Further, the drive access light is still flashing quite a bit on this PC. Similarly, the TX2 seems somewhat more responsive when used but not dramatically so.
I can think of several possible explanations (none of which seem that likely to be good):
- Unlike our other laptops that had 2GB of RAM, this one has 4GB.
- The TX2 has a dual core AMD processor rather than the Core2 Duo in the other laptops.
- The TX2 uses offline files unlike the other laptops that never travel outside our house.
- The TX2 has more applications, e.g. Flicks, Synaptics Pointing Device, Sync Center that launch on login and this takes more time.
- The TX2 is located farther away from a wireless access point so its lower quality network connections slow down other aspects of its performance.
I recently dramatically reduced the size of the offline files in My Documents. That did not immediately result in any great increase in speed, but it may over time, so I’ll report back if any noticeable increase in boot speed in the future.
Technorati Tags: HP TouchSmart TX2,Kingston SSD,boot,speed,offline files
Weird Italics in Internet Explorer
For the past several days, my new HP desktop computer (running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit) has shown much of the text of emails and web page text in italics. Some investigation revealed the reason: the non-italicized versions of these fonts (Arial, Georgia and Verdana) seemed to have be uninstalled from the PC.
Although these fonts are not available to download, and running SFC from the command line indicated nothing was wrong with the Windows installation, I was able to reinstall these fonts by doing a search of my C: drive, double clicking on another copy of the regular version of these fonts and then clicking on the install button.
Car Audio Streaming via Bluetooth
As I mentioned recently, our new Sienna minivan allows streaming audio files from my iPhone—or any Bluetooth device for that matter.
This works quite well. Once the iPhone was paired with the Sienna, it has always appeared whenever I got in. Likewise, this additional Bluetooth pairing has not caused any problems using the iPhone with my normal listening device—a pair of Bluetooth headphones.
This is convenient enough that I am no longer interested in the car audio system I had hoped for for years: playback from an in-car hard drive that automatically sync’d with my home music collection.
The one unfortunate aspect of this bluetooth connection is that there is no ability to pause of advance to a new track, but that is easy enough to implement that I expect it to be implemented whenever Toyota next revises their car audio system.
Similarly, I can’t choose tracks to play from an on-screen display, but that doesn’t bother me too much right now either. I’m just happy not to have to wear headphones in the car to listen to my music and podcasts.
Downgrading Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional
Why do this? When I reinstalled Windows on two of our laptops, I mistakenly did the installation using a Windows Ultimate DVD (and product key). Because this product key was actually from another installation of Windows on one of our home PCs, activation of WIndows 7 failed. I tried to enter a Windows 7 Professional product key, but Windows 7 would not let me downgrade from the Ultimate version to the Professional version.
So a hack was necessary:
- On existing Windows installation, run Registry Editor (RegEdit).
- Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersion
- In the right pane, change the value data of EditionID and ProductName to reflect a minor version of Windows 7.
For example, to fool OS to think that it’s another edition of Windows 7, hack the registry key to the following values as below:
Windows 7 Home Premium (allow Windows 7 Ultimate or Professional to Home Premium downgrade)
EditionID: HomePremium
ProductName: Windows 7 HomePremiumWindows 7 Professional (allow Windows 7 Ultimate to Professional downgrade)
EditionID: Professional
ProductName: Windows 7 ProfessionalNote: The ProductName and EditionID should have the same name with the Windows 7 operating system name displayed during OS selection on the installation DVD.
- Start Windows 7 installation by inserting Windows 7 DVD disc into disc tray.
- Select Upgrade as type of installation. Then, continue to install Windows 7 as per normal.
Interestingly, the upgrade process seems to have involved copying all the files from the installation DVD and then bringing over settings, installing updates, etc. For this PC, that process took over an hour. Then Windows updates still needed to be downloaded and reinstalled and .Net 4 needed to be repaired (which occurred automatically).
I recently installed Kingston 64GB solid state drives in two of our HP Pavillion laptops that we purchased about four years ago (a dv2000 and a dv6000). The speed difference is pretty dramatic. They seem about twice as fast as before. Even my wife was quite impressed.
About 9 months ago, I purchased a new HP TouchSmart TX2 tablet with 4 GB of memory and a dual core AMD Turion X2 2.3 GHz processor. I was a little disappointed by the lack of responsiveness during long periods of disk access, especially when doing web browsing. The old HP laptops are now noticeably faster than the much newer TouchSmart.
The old Pavillions into which the SSD was installed had been annoyingly slow, especially when accessing flash content on the web. No more. Now they each boot in under one minute and are quite responsive. Even though the Pavillions have only 2GB of memory and 1.6 GHz Core2 Duo processors, I now no longer feel any imperative to replace these soon, and hope to get another 1-2 years of service out of them.
At less than $120 for the Kingston 64GB SSD, this is an upgrade I highly recommend. Indeed I won’t buy another laptop without putting an SSD in.
The only caveat about replacing a drive as I did, is that it appears to be impossible to backup an image from a larger hard drive and restore it to a smaller SSD, even though the space used is well shy of the SSD’s capacity. Thus, the upgrade required reinstalling Windows, drivers and various applications.
Media Center PC Instability Caused by External Hard Drive
A few days ago I blogged about severe problems I was having with our Media Center PC. The display would stop working (sometimes blinking out, sometimes it would not come back), I would get blue screens of death, the CableCards became flaky, and an external USB drive would disappear from Explorer (and the rest of Windows).
At first I thought the problem was a bad video card. After all the Windows Reliability History identified a number of crashes as “Video Hardware Error”. I tried updating the drivers, but this had no effect. So I ordered a new video card ($30) and initiated a support ticket with Velocity Micro, the manufacturer of the PC.
While waiting I also disconnected the external USB hard drive that had been disappearing from Windows recently. After doing that, all the problems have disappeared for 48 hours now.
Meanwhile the Velocity Micro Support process drags on. I decided to try support by email after waiting 30 minutes on the phone in queue position one without talking to anyone. Now over 48 hours after the ticket was created the only interaction has been their confirming that I “upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit” rather than some other version of Windows 7.
