Is $1000 a good deal for this DELL?

[Fayd]

Originally Posted by Torn Mind

He should try to attempt to wipe the MBR clean or, if the drive doesn't have one, create one.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...e-a0ea815ce551

Since you are installing this in IDE mode most likely, there are some things you can do to extend the life of the drive, i.e reducing the page file size or completely eliminating it.

he shouldn't be using IDE mode. that negates the performance advantage of the SSD.

OP, make sure you're in AHCI mode.

[Torn Mind]

Originally Posted by Fayd

he shouldn't be using IDE mode. that negates the performance advantage of the SSD.

OP, make sure you're in AHCI mode.

Reduces, not completely negates. Although yes, AHCI mode should be better on average.

He just needs to remember to switch back if he ever needs to boot into the old drive.

[Spades45]

$1000. Dell. No.

[DominionSeraph]

Originally Posted by Spades45

$1000. Dell. No.

Go educate yourself. That was a perfectly acceptable price for an i7 + IPS monitor.

[Hubb1e]

make sure you've set AHCI mode in your BIOS. Do you know how to enter your BIOS? Make sure you have no other drives powered up. Then run the disk. If there is a partition alreay on the drive you may need to go into advanced mode when you first start and delete the partition on the SSD (this is why you MUST make sure the old drive is not hooked up or it will be wiped). There shouldn't be any reason this doesn't work unless the disk is damaged.

[Spades45]

Originally Posted by DominionSeraph

Go educate yourself. That was a perfectly acceptable price for an i7 + IPS monitor.

absolutely 100% not worth it for the crappy CS you will have to deal with.

[puffswimi]

SUCCESS!

Finally installed Windows 7 64-bit OS on my SSD. I did go to the boot directory and made sure that CD drive was the boot drive and it was reading the Win7 installation DVD. I didn't change anything regarding BIOS but what I did do was pull out a flash drive that I had previously attempted to mount the Win7 .ISO file onto. The old-fashioned CD drive eventually worked for me but it good to have a back-up on flash.

Maybe there was some conflict between having the flash drive/installation DVD in the computer together but I think since I had to restart my computer 15-20 times it may have been due to that the Core 2 Duo E8400 is 64-bit "capable" rather than the recommended standard of being "compatible".

Hopefully this will solve some of the core issues that I have been having and now that the RAM bottleneck may have been addressed I hope that it runs more stable and less hot.

I will update regarding any stability, speed and performance issues I may have after a couple of weeks. Thank you all for your advice.

[Hubb1e]

It has nothing to do with the Core 2 Duo being capable/compatible. It's the same thing. The Core 2 is a 64 bit processor. I think you will really like your new setup. The SSD will make everything feel like warp speed and now you're using the extra RAM. Make sure you're using all 8 GB now though just to be sure by going into the Control Panel / System and Security / System page and verify that you're using all 8GB. You can also do a rescan of the windows experience index and you'll probably score pretty well now.

[puffswimi]

Originally Posted by Hubb1e

It has nothing to do with the Core 2 Duo being capable/compatible. It's the same thing. The Core 2 is a 64 bit processor. I think you will really like your new setup. The SSD will make everything feel like warp speed and now you're using the extra RAM. Make sure you're using all 8 GB now though just to be sure by going into the Control Panel / System and Security / System page and verify that you're using all 8GB. You can also do a rescan of the windows experience index and you'll probably score pretty well now.

Hubb1e, your help was especially helpful. My WinExpScore is 6.6 out of 7.9, which seems optimized. Gonna keep tweeking it and report back after more hours of use.

[Sleepingforest]

Soo... how does it feel? Snappy? New? The fresh install should be helping some, as well as switching to an SSD.

[puffswimi]

Originally Posted by Sleepingforest

Soo... how does it feel? Snappy? New? The fresh install should be helping some, as well as switching to an SSD.

Well, I had thought it would be faster and it seemed like it was initially but now it has slowed down to seemingly less than its 32-bit speed. There is considerable lag in the browsers opening, copying files to DVD once took about 10 minutes for 4.2GB now takes at least an hour, videos also open and sort of go in slo-mo before getting up to speed.

I set my BIOS to "optimized default" after reinstalling Win7-64 and also loaded several programs back on my computer from downloads.com that had been erased in the reinstall.

Any ideas as what these symptoms may indicate? A Virus? A crunch on my E8400 or 8GB RAM? Thoughts?

Thank you.

[VirtualLarry]

Originally Posted by puffswimi

There is considerable lag in the browsers opening, copying files to DVD once took about 10 minutes for 4.2GB now takes at least an hour, videos also open and sort of go in slo-mo before getting up to speed.

Any ideas as what these symptoms may indicate? A Virus? A crunch on my E8400 or 8GB RAM? Thoughts?

Thank you.

Did you knock the heatsink loose when you got inside your machine? Check your temps with RealTemp or CoreTemp.

Your SSD could be failing too.

[Torn Mind]

Originally Posted by puffswimi

Well, I had thought it would be faster and it seemed like it was initially but now it has slowed down to seemingly less than its 32-bit speed. There is considerable lag in the browsers opening, copying files to DVD once took about 10 minutes for 4.2GB now takes at least an hour, videos also open and sort of go in slo-mo before getting up to speed.

I set my BIOS to "optimized default" after reinstalling Win7-64 and also loaded several programs back on my computer from downloads.com that had been erased in the reinstall.

Any ideas as what these symptoms may indicate? A Virus? A crunch on my E8400 or 8GB RAM? Thoughts?

Thank you.

That site has become a "dark side" site now. Watch out, getting malware is not an impossibility from there. Go to bleepingcomputer.com forums for advice on security related issues.
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/dds/
If you find something with DDS, then there is some unwanted program on your site and they can help you take the steps to fix it.

https://www.google.com/search?q=down...ient=firefox-a

The articles are a bit dated, but it might still be the case that they're bundling *ware that eats your CPU cycles and I/O operations.

http://insecure.org/news/download-com-fiasco.html


I'd reinstall Windows again just to see if the snappiness comes back. If it does, then some software was responsible.

[puffswimi]

Thank you.

Yes, when I was going to downloads.com it was a very different downloading experience than I remember from years ago. But I trusted the name so I went with it. I feel like its connected to some corrupted server (corrupt as in the Ukrainian mafia).

It makes sense. The computer was definitely snappy out of the gate but then broke a leg around the second turn. Its really weird. I swear even the typing is somewhat affected.

Also as Hubb1e mentioned testing the Windows Experience Index which has gone DOWN from its initial test. Also lots of weird wonky "flashing" on the screen every once in a while. Oh and the computer shut down and restarted (just short of the login screen) last nite, maybe 10 times in a row before locking-in to the password screen and letting me login. This has never ever happened when I was running 32-bit so I thought the computer was going through some growing pains when this happened.

OH...and also two flash drives were wiped out inexplicably. And the DVD drive has come up as missing a couple of times.

So where do I load programs like bitcomet and such? When I googled it, many of the initial links were from cnet.download.com.

It may be a while before I log-in as I am going to reboot. But maybe in a couple of hours things will be back to normal.

[Torn Mind]

For now, boot into Safe Mode or Safe Mode with Networking. You can either take the long and tedious way and get guidance from the bleepingcomputer.com security experts, or you can wipe your Windows install and reinstall.

Programs usually have an official site, i.e http://www.bitcomet.com/ , to download from. There are also places like File Hippo or Softpedia, which haven't gone shady like CNET/download.com.

You probably want to partition your hard drive so you have "free space" left over. Definitely make a backup of your fresh install as well.

[puffswimi]

Screaming out of the gate again!

Finally did a clean reinstall of Win7-64. I had tried to formatting the SSD thru the cmd prompts and various other ways but after reinstalling Win7 about 3 times and still having the same performance problems, I knew that I had to do something else that may actually swipe my SSD completely clean.

I googled swipe HD and this came up, http://www.dban.org/, which is a free download to clean your hard drive completely, sector by sector. It suggests that you clean the hard drive overnight and that is what I did. I think the dban program did an excellent job.

I know this is unrelated to "buying a Dell" but figured I should put this information here where others can see flowchart of what I have done and follow its lead or just go ahead and buy a Dell (which doesn't seem like such a bad idea come to think of it?).

I am going to try to reinstall some programs a little more diligently without using CNET or DOWNLOADS.com and so far that is the take-away for anyone else reading my advice post install.

Will update with more info soon but going to try to optimize the performance before doing so.

Best.

[T_Yamamoto]

DBan just writes zeros over the whole HDD. Its very effective.

[Eureka]

Originally Posted by puffswimi

Screaming out of the gate again!

Finally did a clean reinstall of Win7-64. I had tried to formatting the SSD thru the cmd prompts and various other ways but after reinstalling Win7 about 3 times and still having the same performance problems, I knew that I had to do something else that may actually swipe my SSD completely clean.

I googled swipe HD and this came up, http://www.dban.org/, which is a free download to clean your hard drive completely, sector by sector. It suggests that you clean the hard drive overnight and that is what I did. I think the dban program did an excellent job.

I know this is unrelated to "buying a Dell" but figured I should put this information here where others can see flowchart of what I have done and follow its lead or just go ahead and buy a Dell (which doesn't seem like such a bad idea come to think of it?).

I am going to try to reinstall some programs a little more diligently without using CNET or DOWNLOADS.com and so far that is the take-away for anyone else reading my advice post install.

Will update with more info soon but going to try to optimize the performance before doing so.

Best.

ninite.com Best website for fast-installing common programs. It uses a general "best" install settings for all the programs, like not installing toolbars.

[puffswimi]

Eureka,

Thanks for the great advice.

Ninite.com works wonderfully so far, and directly addresses what my caused the problems with my computer installation. I think many of these programs if not installed cleanly introduce a lot of changes to the registry of the computer or something. The newest version of Apple's iTunes also caused some registry problems so maybe one should be cautious about installing that off of itunes.com as well.

p.s. you should add an exclamation point (!) after your name? I have never seen "Eureka" without an exclamation point following the word.

[puffswimi]

Just an update:

I got most of my regular browsers, media players, torrent service providers, website favorites installed and running over the past couple of days. From my research in whether deciding to upgrade to a DELL/i5, it seems that the Intel E8400 that I currently have is one of the best CPUs ever manufactured and has significant overclocking potential.

So for the first time I overclocked, after reading that some people have the CPU running at 4.2Ghz and stable I thought I could do the same but ending up causing my current Gigabyte BIOS to keep resetting back to stock-settings of 3.0 because I didn't take babysteps. Apparently you need to mess with the voltage and rather than do that I set my CPU at 3.6. I have been usings Core Temp 1.0 RC3 and CPU-Z OC to measure the temps and stuff. So far so good, all in the mid 30'sC.

As a non-technical person, I am not qualified to give advice so I can only relate what I have done. However, I will say....get an expensive/comfortable office chair, a good big monitor and a high-quality mouse (i.e. gaming). These three non-technical suggestions make all the difference to your computing experience, at least to me.

[mfenn]

Congrats on your successful overclock!

Originally Posted by puffswimi

As a non-technical person, I am not qualified to give advice so I can only relate what I have done. However, I will say....get an expensive/comfortable office chair, a good big monitor and a high-quality mouse (i.e. gaming). These three non-technical suggestions make all the difference to your computing experience, at least to me.

to this. Also add a good keyboard to that list.