Ryan J.com

My SSD arrived yesterday evening. Unfortunately, I had class, so I was only able to do much more than install Windows 7 and the appropriate updates. The OS install took approximately 15 minutes, which may be attributed to the slow-ish optical drive in my laptop. So far my experience has been pretty positive. Rebooting takes less than a minute - it takes longer to post than to load Windows 7. Installing software seems almost instant compared to the 7200 RPM drive I was previously using to boot from. For anyone wanting to learn more about solid state drives prior to taking the dive I highly recommend Anandtech's article on selecting an SSD which goes into detailed explanations on the technology.

Tonight I am attempting to optimize everything as best I can. The main article I will be following will be TweakTown's Solid State Drive Optimization Guide. The first thing I am going to do is install Intel's Rapid Storage Technology (RST) that was released near the end of last month. I'm still researching if some of these tweaks are necessary but so far I have had pretty solid results.

After restarting, the machine is ready for use in about 45 seconds, with a large portion of that tied to post as I mentioned previously. Generally I have to wait around a minute and a half before I can begin using applications but I have noticed as soon as Windows has loaded with the SSD I can immediately begin working - okay playing . I'm excited to see how the drive does after I have used it for a while since I have read a bit about degradation after the drive has some age.

So far... both thumbs way up! My Windows Experience Index went from 5.5 to 6.4 with the drive chiming in at 7.7 on the scale - my 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo and 4Gb of 800Mhz being the weakest links. It's a laptop. I'm not going to complain. SSD really do rock!

I finally bit the bullet and ordered an SSD (Solid State Drive) from the egg a few days ago.  I've been eying them for well over a year but the price has always seemed to outweigh my desire and curiosity.  My Intel X25-M G2 (2nd gen) will be arriving tomorrow at some point.   I will be installing Windows 7 Ultimate (x64) on this drive as soon as I get home from class.

A couple YouTube vids that made me even more excited...

150Gb 10k RPM Raptor vs X25-M (G1) booting:

Another Raptor comparison - Loading 51 apps (in Vista):

Tomorrow is the day!

I recently purchased a second monitor to get rid of my behemoth Samsung 21 inch CRT that my older machine was using.  I shopped around a bit looking at reviews trying to find a monitor for gaming with a 2ms response time to upgrade my gaming machine - the intention being that I use my 24" Gateway (that oddly enough I have been very satisfied with for the past 2 years) on the older box.

I decided to take a gamble and go with an Asus monitor.  I've used their motherboards and dvd drives in the past without problems and the reviews on various sites were pretty good.  Since I prefer to see what I'm buying before even considering online ordering I went into Fry's for a gander.  I ended up finding 25.5 inch beauty that looked very appealing... the VW266H.

I got it home, set it up and was instantly unhappy.  No dead pixels but everything had a blue tint.  So I went in search of some settings others had used online to see what I could get the monitor to do.  The annoying thing is I didn't really find anything very helpful.  I may still take the monitor back since I haven't made my final decision but I figured I would post the settings I found to be the best after a couple hours of messing with them.

Splendid Mode: Standard Mode
Brightness: 70
Contrast: 92
Sharpness: 63
OverDrive: 60 (default)
Color Temp: User Mode
Red: 85
Green: 75
Blue: 62

So that is that.  I'm going to try the monitor out for a week and see how I feel.  After the changes I'm pretty happy but time will tell.

For the past several years I have used mainly Nvidia graphics cards when building my home computers.  Originally, I was an "ATI guy", but at some point Nvidia seemed to take the lead and I found I had less issues using their cards than ATI models.  This was probably four years ago.

Times change.  Apparently, ATI has made a huge comeback after being purchased by AMD... and it shows.  What change my mind?  A coworker told me that he was in the same boat but decided to go with ATI when his built his most recent machine since the cost to performance ratio was better.  

After taking a look at what he proposed, a 1Gb Radeon 4890,  as an upgrade to my 512Mb Nvidia 8800 GT I said sure why not.  I went to Fry's (instant gratification much?) and bought one after work.  There was only one... maybe it is the overly strange shape of the box that is attracting people?  It only took about 20 minutes to install... mainly due to having to shuffle around the internal wiring coming from my power supply.  The card requires two 6-pin or 8-pin  power connections instead of the 1 my last card needed and I had pushed the wire I didn't need in an awkward place out of the way in my case.

The ATI Catalyst software seems to have been revamped and improved greatly.  Setting up my dual monitors was a breeze and everything integrated perfectly into Windows 7.  My FPS in WoW went from 60 to 140 (outside Dalaran).  An incredible improvement. 

ATI Radeon 4890

So, about a week or two ago, Microsoft announced their release of Windows 7 RC (release candidate). I've been reading about Windows 7 for a while as others tried out the beta and decided to finally take the plunge myself.

I've only ran into a few problems... and I am going to list their solutions here in case they may help anyone.

Extra hard drives don't show up and can not be accessed... but Disk Manager can see it!
This ended up being a pretty simple issue to remedy. Right click on the drive in question and go to "Properties" and you will find an option to "Add a drive letter" to the disk. Just give it a drive letter and you are on your way...

Symantec anti-virus would not install...
I ended up going with AVG Free, since no matter what I tried, Symantec would not install correctly.

Apart from that I've had no issues and everything works great so far.