I’ll happily go on record as saying “I like Vista”. Don’t get me wrong, it has its flaws (UAC bugs the hell out of me), but it performed reasonably well on my bog-standard Dell machine. But after three years (in August) of constant use, the cracks were begining to show: rather than wipe and reinstall Vista, I thought it would be a prudent time to make the jump to Win7 – and with pre-order prices as crazy as they were, there really was no excuse. Win7 Business ordered, and I was happy. Until I saw another post by Mr Atwood on the virtues of having an SSD as your primary drive.
After a bit of research (and getting an ear bashing for keeping all my data and programs on the same HDD), I took the plunge and ordered a 64Gb SSD by Crucial. Last Wednesday came, and despite the postal strikes, so did my copy of Win7 and my SSD. After some tinkering to get the 2.5″ drive in the best place in a standard 3.5″ bay, everything was ready and Win7 was duely thrown on.
Boy oh boy – what a difference!. It’s like going from a cronky all 486 dx2 to a shiny Pentium 1. Now, I realise the improvments are a combination of a) The SSD b) Win7 c) A clean install. But still:
- Win7 x64 installed without any problems. Dell offer “no 64 Bit support” for my 3 yr old Inspiron. Every single one of the drivers for my system came from the Windows DVD, and everything works without a hitch
- The SSD is blazingly fast. Even after piling on a load of applications, including sql-server, my PC still goes from POST to login prompt in 10 seconds, and from there to a usable desktop in another 3 or 4
- Applications load virtually instantly. The only thing I’ve found that takes a while is Netbeans, which takes 3 or 4 seconds to load completly.
- Win7 is just Vista with polish, but it’s the triple-wax, hand buffed version of polish. As a dual-screen user, the new Aero keyboard shortcuts for moving windows to a specific screen are just awesome.
- The 64Gb drive has about 55% free, and thats with Win7, VS, Netbeans, broswer, email, Open Office, sql-server and a heap of utilities installed. Oh, and it’s Fast!
