My GPU and CPU issues

[Armando]

Re: My GPU and CPU issues

The extra $40 would ensure quality, but will I even notice the difference?

Not all SSDs perform the same, which is the bigger factor in the price difference. But since the typical SSD use case rarely involves trying to dump 80 GB on it all at once, or doing thousands of back-to-back random 4KB writes, I doubt you'd notice a difference even if you did the research and bought the highest-performing one. At the end of the day no matter which you buy, it's going to be fast.

[DakAttack]

Re: My GPU and CPU issues

Ok, thanks.

From what I've read, I should be able to back-up my current HDD, and use that image during the fresh installation of Windows 7 to the SSD. Does this provide the fresh installation, or is this just another way to migrate the OS? I feel like I've accumulated a lot of bloatware and crap files since I first installed the current OS. There are at least a dozen different C++, .Net, and XML programs installed by Microsoft, among other things. It still irks me that there are various files and folders to programs that are no longer on my PC still hiding out somewhere, and that the registry is most likely a mess of old programs and old malware keys.

[Armando]

Re: My GPU and CPU issues

From what I've read, I should be able to back-up my current HDD, and use that image during the fresh installation of Windows 7 to the SSD. Does this provide the fresh installation, or is this just another way to migrate the OS?

The thing I wrote a couple of posts back would just clone everything and dump Windows on your SSD exactly as it was on your old HDD. Unless you made an image of your hard drive immediately after Windows was installed, you're probably going to have to install it from scratch if you want to start over. I've noticed laptops tend to come with an extra partition so you can reset it to how it was out-of-the-box, but that's probably not your situation and "out-of-the-box" still involves pre-installed bloatware.

[DakAttack]

Re: My GPU and CPU issues

Alright, so I spent some time last night trying to use system image restore to copy everything from the HDD to the SSD, and nearly bricked the HDD without making any progress with the SSD. I realize my HDD is running from two partitions, with the boot manager on a 102MB partition, and the rest of the windows on the next. I found a program that was supposed to copy the boot manager from the smaller partition to the larger, so that I would no longer need it, but that prevented me from booting into Windows at all.

So now I'm looking into cloning the partitions. I found a few programs that can do it from within Windows or from a boot CD. Now, I'm thinking I need to clone both partitions, but I'm not exactly sure on that. Is that really necessary? Is there an easier way to merge the partitions so I'm not running from two? Is it even a big deal that I'm running from two? Would creating two partitions on the SSD before cloning the partitions from the HDD work? What programs would you guys recommend?

[DakAttack]

Re: My GPU and CPU issues

What the fuck guys this is really frustrating!

So my current HDD has two partitions, each is necessary to boot and properly run Windows. I spent $20 on a widely well-reviewed program called Migrate OS to SSD, by Paragon Software, but it throws me an error after migrating the System Reserved partition. I submitted a support ticket with the publishers, since there's very little support otherwise. I guess it's worked well-enough that there just aren't enough people complaining about it. Before this I attempted to create a system image to restore to the SSD, but I ran into a heap of problems with that. I'm not entirely certain that would have worked, to begin with.

Any words of wisdom would be appreciated. Since the System Reserved partition was successfully migrated, I created the second partition manually. I'm now backing up the C: drive with DriveImage XML, which will allow me to restore it to the second partition on the SSD. At that point, I believe I would need to set the SSD partition to C:, so that links from desktop shortcuts and the registry would find properly the files they're being pointed to. Please correct me if I'm wrong because

BECAUSE...

[Armando]

Re: My GPU and CPU issues

Is there any way you could show us a screenshot of the partitions? I find it odd that Windows requires two partitions to boot. However, I will say that Windows is crazy bitchy about having its partitions moved. You can resize or clone it, but moving the start of the Windows partition will most certainly break your boot. A Windows 7 Repair Disc will fix any boot problems, maybe they're available on Microsoft's site?

As far as partitioning software goes, I generally use a bootable flash drive with the latest version of Ubuntu. It'll have GParted installed, which is what I used to shrink and clone my HDD's partitions onto the SSD.

[DakAttack]

Re: My GPU and CPU issues

I'm at work now so I can't grab a screenshot, but from what I've read it's pretty common. There's supposed to be a program that'll move any necessary files from the System Reserved partition to the main one so that you can remove it safely. But after using it, myself, and leaving the System Reserved partition in tact just in case, I wasn't able to boot from the second partition.

I ran chkdsk and found that the old HDD was ridden with issues, which were all fixed, as far as I could tell. It seems likely that this is what was causing the cloning process to fail, since creating a back-up of the partition also failed with only a stop error. I'm also going to defragment the drive, just in case the size it thought it was moving was spread out over the HDD.

[DakAttack]

Re: My GPU and CPU issues

I got everything set up properly with the SSD. After running scan after scan, I found that my copy of Windows was broken, and then after Google after Google, I ended up running a repair upgrade which set everything straight. The one tiny issue was enough to prevent the entire partition from cloning.

I would like to share my experience with cloning partitions. Not everything appears to be running the same way as it did before the clone. McAfee require a complete reinstall. Steam required I reinstall everything. Punkbuster wasn't running correctly, and also needed a reinstall. A clean install of Windows 7 may have not been necessary, but it seems like some programs require a clean install.

[Raydeus]

Re: My GPU and CPU issues

Cloning falls under the same category as System Restore. It rarely works and usually breaks more than it fixes.

A clean reinstall with update download and reinstall of most common programs would take no more than 5 hours. And if you made a back up for your steam games you can easily reinstall them along with all your save files in a matter of minutes when you are going to play. How much time did you waste trying to avoid a complete reinstall? <_<;

The lazy work more.

[Armando]

Re: My GPU and CPU issues

Sorry I couldn't be of more help, I've been at my fiancé's this past week and her Internet is out 80% of the time. I find it very odd that Steam of all things required a reinstall - you can easily take Steam's steamapps folder and dump it on a new Steam install and it'll find the games just fine. Well, initially they show up as uninstalled but once you try to install it it realizes all the files are already there.

At any rate, I should've known that cloning the partitions wouldn't copy the bootloader. In my case it was easier, because I dual boot Windows and Ubuntu and Grub didn't give me any problems. When I was installing an SSD on my fiancé's laptop I had to make a Windows 7 Recovery Disc with my laptop and use it to set up the Windows bootloader on the SSD. It worked without a hitch though. Glad you finally got it working though.