Free Advice on SSD, VRAM and Scratch Pad

[Oligarch]

Hello my fellow mybroadband lovers

I recently purchased a OCZ Agility 4 256GB Solid State Drive and a Drive Cradle that fits where my cd rom is and I would like to put my regular HDD into the cd cradle and the SSD into the onboard drive slot.

I would then like to set up my pc in a particular way and would greatly appreciate any advice or perhaps even step by step instructions on how to go about achieving this configuration.

I am running a HP G62 laptop windows 7 64 bit with a Intel Pentium P6100@2.00Ghz processor, ATI Mobility Raedon HD5470 Display card with 3gig onboard RAM

(I also have another PC to assist with transferring info if needed.)

1. I want to partition the SSD to give me an additional 9 gig of Virtual RAM partition, thus giving me 12 gig of RAM in total.

2. I want a 25 gig partition to use as a "scratch pad memory" partition. The purpose for this is to utilize this partition for Photoshop, Corel Draw and my sound production software to use for calculations.

3. I would like my operating system and all my setting and programs currently on my HDD to be cloned onto the SSD without having to buy expensive software.. (PS I ensured that there is ample space on th SSD to do this)

4. I would like lastly to partition my HDD to

(a) be the storage my for documents.

(b) Have a partition set for "recovery"

Thank you in advance for any help, I am an average computer user and would greatly welcome any suggestions and advice.

 

[Pada]

It is a waste in my opinion to get a SSD for a slow laptop like that! I tried a 120GB G.Skill Phoenix Pro in my Dell Inspiron 9400 (Intel Core2Duo T7200 2.0GHz) and it didn't improve much aside from slightly faster application load times, because the CPU was the major bottleneck. Your CPU is like 4 years newer, but only slightly faster than my T7200 according to benchmarks like PassMark.

You don't need to create a separate scratch pad partition, because Photoshop will automatically use your temporary folder, that already resides on your SSD, for its "scratch pad". The SSD should indeed speed up Photoshop for this purpose, but the better option would be to install more RAM.

Currently when you run out of the 3GB of RAM, Windows will already use your SSD as "VRAM" like you put it. In Windows it is called a Page File and typically Windows will use your operating system's drive for this.

Either like 2x Transcend JM1333KSN-4G, JetRam, 4GB, DDR3-1333, CL9, 1.5v, 204-Pin @ R273 each
or 2x Transcend JM1333KSH-8G, JetRam, 8GB, DDR3-1333, CL9, 1.5v, 204-Pin @ R511 each.
I'd recommend the 2x 8GB modules if your laptop supports that high density.

Also, what version of Windows 7 x64 do you have, because Home Basic x64 only allow up to 8GB of RAM and Home Premium x64 up to 16GB.

At my home I have 9GB of RAM, with 2GB assigned to a RAM drive (there are freely available software for this) that I use as a "scratch pad" for Audacity and it works wonderfully. At my office I have 32GB of RAM, with a 4GB of RAM drive that I use for MySQL and it also works great. Both at my home and office I have 120GB GB SSD's for my applications.

I hope you do have an external LCD/LED screen (preferably IPS panel for colour accuracy) with a high resolution (1920x1080 or higher) to do your drawings on, because otherwise you're just wasting time struggling on a measly 1366 x 768 resolution!

 

[Oligarch]

Thank you for your reply Pada

I will take your advice and invest in more physical RAM for now and eventually transfer the SSD and RAM to a better spec'd laptop towards the end of the year. As for the external displays, I am currently using a SAMSUNG SyncMaster 21.5" S22A300B, but I am seriously considering to purchasing two LG D2343P-BN, 23" 3D LED, Monitor WITH IPS Technology as my next investment.

http://www.rebeltech.co.za/index.ph...=762&authkey=0b9567bb5634b84dcbae96664321d722

At least it doesn't seem such a daunting task anymore