SSD Windows 7 settings

Solid state drives are getting popular, just got one for a home use.

After loads of research it turns out Crucial State Drive2 64GB M4 (£80) has the best performance and value (same for 128GB,512GB). 3 years warranty.

The drives are still quite expensive so you can get it just for your windows and application and store the rest of the data on another drive.

Nonetheless, the performance of the PC is great, Windows reboots within seconds , 95 windows updates installed in under 5 minutes.

I’d advise anyone to cut down on the price of the CPU from i7 to i5 and get SSD.



Windows 7 x 64bit installation turns out to take around 23GB of space!

Here are 2 steps that helped me to severly reduce it.

1. Disable hibernation.

The best way to delete hiberfil.sys or disable hibernate:

Go to Start menu, type “cmd” open up command prompt
Type “powercfg.exe -h off” [make sure you are an Administrator]
ENTER
Type “exit”
ENTER

2. Remove file paging (if you have enough RAM)

Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> System
On the left-hand side bar under Task -> Advanced System settings
System Properties -> Advanced tab -> Performance Settings… -> advanced tab -> Change
Uncheck “Automatically manage paging file size for all drivers”
Set it to 400MB (minimum safe I’d say)

3. Move the user folder on another drive.(Create another admin user to do this, after it can be purged)

Copy the original Default profile folder in C:\users to the new location. (by default this “Default” directory is hidden, you need to go Tools > Folder Options > View (tab) > Show Hidden files, folders, and drivers.)
Copy the original Public profile folder in C:\users to the new location. (lets say D:\ drive)
Open Registry Editor by type regedit from command line, and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList.
Change the value of the Default, Public, Profile Directory keys to the new location accordingly.
Log off. From this point on, any new user logged in to this computer will have a new user profile that’s located in the new location.



And also:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

EnablePrefetcher and EnableSuperFetch should be set to 0

information gathered from few web forums/blogs/own practical experience combined into one source of information.