2006 HP inspiron running Win XP Can I put a solid state drive in it?

[GENEXPLOVER]

I have a new (2014) windows 10 desktopo computer with a SSD for the OS. This system boots so fast that about a year ago I decided to get an SSD for my business system which runs Win XP.  Before I installed the SSD I found that there is not much advantage to the SSD unless you have some form of high speed ATF (?is that right) installed on the old system drive. I understand the SSD runs at the same speed as the previous hard drive if you clone the system from one to the other. I also understand that the SSD works best if you have it set to the newer drive software the starts with an H or AH. At one time I had several opinions I gleened from the web that told me how to change my old HD over to the faster software and then clone it to the SSD but I seem to have lost that info. In addition there may be something new out there that works as good, maybe better. Anyway here is the quesstions:

1. If I change the software on the old HD managing system will it still read the drive or will it fail to read it entirely.

2. Is there some software out there that makes it possible to use the faster drivers on the old HD that installs while running? I understand that the faster drivers were developed just before Windows went to Win 7 and there were some hardware changes to accomodate the SSD's. Also I suspect that HP may no longer have the drivers available since they stopped suporting XP machines.

3. Does anybody know of some cloning software for a 400-500 Gig HD that is dependable, easy to use and free or nearly so. I want to clone the old HD to the SSD of the same size.

4. What should I do about keeping the new SSD clean and active. I have been told that they need special handling in these older instalations.

Is there anybody left of the old timers that can help me?

Thanks.

[WAWood]

GENEXPLOVER

Let me answer what I can ...

Two problems are likely when trying to use an SSD in an XP system: drive connectors and throughput.  

Unless you've modified the system, it most likely only has IDE drive connectors and SSDs use SATA.  So, you would have to get an adapter to be able to connect the SSD.

Throughput is going to be drastically reduced since XP systems are most likely 133 at best, some being only 120, and SATA "1" is 150.  In comparisons, most current SATA systems are 600.  So, your real-time performance of the SSD is going to be bottlenecked by the slow speed of the bus.

There is no way to really utilize the perfomance of newer faster drives as the bus speed is the limiter.  A 7200 RPM drive is going to perform just as slowly as a 5200RPM drive on an old XP-bus machine. 

As to cloning the HDD to an SSD, I have used a utility known as Macrium Reflect to do this several times without problems.

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
2) Connect the new drive to the PC using a USB drive adapter
3) Follow the instructions in this link: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Cloning+a+disk
4) Shutdown the PC when done
5) Swap the drives and reboot the PC.

You should boot from the new drive without any problems.

As to keeping the SSD clean, you need to enable TRIM -- and I know newer OSs do this by default, but I don't know what you need to do to enable this on an older OS, and without it, your SSD performance is really going to degrade over time.

Good Luck

[GENEXPLOVER]

Thanks for the reply, I am disapointed that the SSD will not improve the throughput due to buss speed. That had not come up in previous discussions. The fact that full SSD speeds are not availabe was discussed but I had been lead to believe a much higher speed was expected in boot times. Mayde as much as a factor of 2

I did get the SSD about a year ago and it is installed in my system as a D:/ drive currently. I have kept from using it so it is formatted but not storing anything.  You are correct about the adapters, which I already purchased at that time. I believe the original machine may have a faster motherboard buss speed since it was purchased very near the time that they started using SSD's.

When HP was suporting this system they seemd to think there was a way to improve on the speed of the 7200 RPM drive with the - then new SSD's. I know that on the Maximum PC forum the guys were helpful but I can not figure out how to get back to that forum. On my computer today it looks like the Maximum PC web page has been hyjacked to some gaming PC page.

Thanks for the step by step with the cloning software. That looks like it will work just fine. but I am going to go to a couple of other forums and get additional second opinions before I give up on the SSD speed factor.

I think there was some talk about the TRIM problem in my older forum discussions and there might have been a solution in that info. I am going to search through my printed history and try to find those messages. They also talked about Slipstreaming info onto a system disk so I could reload Win. XP with SP3 and some other drivers on it.

If all else fails I will at least have a hard drive to replace the original which I believe is on it's last legs.

I do appreciate your input and I hope you ar not 100% correct in your prediction but I do suspect you are. Bummer!

I will be back later and let you know what I have learned.

[mdklassen]

> Thanks for the reply, I am disapointed that the SSD will not improve the throughput due to buss speed. That had not come up in previous discussions. The fact that full SSD speeds are not availabe was discussed but I had been lead to believe a much higher speed was expected in boot times. Mayde as much as a factor of 2

The speed of data transfer depends on TWO factors:

* the speed of a "spinning" disk-drive.  If you ask the disk-drive to read a block of data,

that disk must revolve until the data is "under" the read/write mechanism.

On a 5400 RPM disk-drive, that is 90 revolutions per second.

Mathematically, the "average" time to correctly position the data is one half of one revolution of the disk.

So, each "read" request will take 1/180 of one second.

Obviously, a SSD does not "spin".  So, this 1/180 of a second becomes "zero rotational delay" -- much faster.

* the speed of the data-bus, to transfer the data from the device to the motherboard.

Maybe, your motherboard is capable of receiving data faster (say from a 7200 RPM) disk-drive than with the current disk-drive. So, replacing your 5400 RPM drive by a 7200 RPM disk-drive will reduce that "rotational delay".

Obviously, data-transfer from a SSD will be at the "rated" speed of the motherboard, not just the "current" speed (with the 5400 RPM disk) or the "faster" speed (with a 7200 RPM disk).

Bottom line: yes, a SSD will be faster than a "spinning" disk.

Obviously, a better motherboard will "leverage" the fast data-transfer potential of a SSD.

Recommendation: replace that old Windows XP computer.  Given that Microsoft stopped issuing security-updates for Windows XP over 2-and-a-half years ago, don't connect that computer to the Internet.

[GENEXPLOVER]

You are right in saying that I should get a new machine if I want to have a machine that is updated all the time for internet purposes but there are firewalls and mailware defenders out there that are being updated all the time so It is truly not necessary to upgrade away from XP just because Microsoft has abandoned it.

I have several business programs (not apps) that will not run on Win 7, 8 or 10 and I refuse to spend upwards of $7,000 on newer software just because windows abandoned XP and indirectly me. You can run XP on the web as long as you use Firefox or Google Chrome and do not install IE. Internet Explorer is the main culpret in the internet vulnerability issue in my opinion. I run Bit Defender which is updated daily and a second scanner to check for viruses that might sneek through. This system seems to be working with more than one XP machine at my house. By the way I do not keep them on when not in use so they are only on line for short intervals. That is why I want faster boot times.

I appreciate your treatus on HD speed and I understand what you are saying. In the research I did about a yer ago there was a lot of talk about the slow corruption of the SSD due to the SATA drivers not suplying the TRIM functions necessary for the new SSD operating system. If I remember correctly the discussion was centered around the newer drivers doing a function in real time to address that issue. I can not remember the four letter identification of the Hard drive mechanism on the Bias but it is something that replaced SATA drivers with the advent of the SSD and I remember the discussin going something like this. 

If you put an SSD in your system and try to run it with SATA drivers it will slowly become corrupted over time and it will not run as fast as the newer "AH--" drivers make it work. The general consencus was that if I cloned my system drive to the new SSD while the original drive was operating with the older SATA drivers then the new system whould not improve much on the speed of the boot process but if I got my system disk to run with the "souped up" SATA drivers that were suposed to work on my system then the SSD would significantly improve the speed of my system bercause I could then use the "AH--" drivers on it and in that case the TRIM function would be active. I got all this info from a forum on Maximum PC but when I went to their page I could not find the forum. They seemed to have changed their page to something unrecognisable now.

So: long story short: can anyone out there figure out what I am remembering and FIRST, help me get the TRIM function working on my SSD or maybe treat it periodically. (I htink of this as something like Defraging) and SECOND direct me in getting the most out of my possible speed bottleneck with the SSD. 

I really appreciate you guys and the service you are trying to provide and any help is truly appreciated.

[mdklassen]

> the new system would not improve much on the speed of the boot process

Q: What happens as Windows is booted?

A: Many files are read from the disk-drive.

Q: How much "rotational delay" slows down the reading of those files from a SSD? from a "spinning" disk?

A: None. Lots.

Q: Does a "spinning" disk-drive have other delays that a SSD does not?

A: Yes, as the read/write head moves from track-to-track, "seeking" the correct track.

Q: Does "rotational delay" and "seek-time" increase the elapsed time to read those files?

A: Yes.

Q: Give me a four-letter contraction.

A: AHCI.

Q: What happens if you write a file that takes 5 sectors on a disk-drive,

and then rewrite the first 3 of those sectors, with a different file?

A: Windows marks the "trailing" 2 sectors as "free" -- available to be assigned to some future file.

Q: Does the SSD know that those 2 sectors are now "free" ?

A: No.

Q: Does this "corrupt" the SSD?

A: Definitely not.

Q: What if you wrote the 3 sectors, and added a TRIM command?

A: The SSD would be told that those 2 sectors are "free", and would not try any of its special "tricks" to optimize the life of each of the memory-cells.

Q: What "tricks" ?

A: Tracking, per memory-cell, which cells are "wearing-out", and, in the background, silently moving the contents of the memory-cell to a different location on the SSD, and "remapping" the SSD, so that any request for the contents will be fulfilled from the "new" (and "fresh") memory-cell, instead of the "old" memory-cell.  If the 'TRIM' has told the SSD that the contents have been "forfeited", it has no need to "manage" that memory-cell, in the short term.

Q: Any other questions?

A: One -- Hillary or Donald or none-of-the-above ?

[GENEXPLOVER]

This helped me remember the AHCI coment or at least the abreviation. If memory serves you can set your system to read your hard drive as SATA or AHCI in the Bios under boot settings. This was one of the ways to make the SSD run faster and activate TRIM for your SSD.

 OK now I have some new questions for you: 

It seems some folks think you can not run Win XP as an OS on the newer hardware. Is that true? Do I have to run it on a Virtual Drive? I thought about doing that with my newer desk top but I ran into problems alocating the memory on my Virtual drive when I tried it on the system running Win 8.1. The Virtual machine was suposed to resize the virtual hard drive dynamically as I ran the program but it kept comming up with "out of memory" messages; additionally I never could figure out how to access my network drives and utilize the files while running the Virtual system. Maybe that is my own problems with brain drain or something but I could never get it right so I want to set up a cheep computer running XP as the main OS and just use it or my business only. I need to be able to network it in my home network so I can store the work on my 2006 Home network machine. That way I can email files processed on the XP system to other folks I work with.

Thanks guys.

[mdklassen]

> It seems some folks think you can not run Win XP as an OS on the newer hardware. Is that true? 

Yes and no.

Most XP-vintage motherboards used add-in cards for modem, network, audio, and video devices.

Most modern motherboards have integrated video & audio & network circuitry.

But, XP had little support for such integrated devices.

So, once XP was installed, you had to go either to the motherboard manufacturer's web-site,

or the web-site of the vendor of the add-in cards, to download the device-driver software.

Currently, you need to "hope" that the webmasters for those sites have _not_ removed the downloads for their "legacy" devices.  HP routinely deletes device-drivers for its printers that are more than 10 years old.

> The Virtual machine was suposed to resize the virtual hard drive dynamically as I ran the program but it kept coming up with "out of memory" messages;

A virtualized Windows XP needs 512MB to 2GB of virtual RAM.  Then, given the amount of virtual RAM, it would build a swap-file (on the virtual-disk) that was between 1 and 3 times the size of the virtual RAM.   So, be sure that you allocate enough of your "real" RAM and your "real" disk-drive to support the Virtual Machine.

[mdklassen]

In a Windows 7 Professional system, if you right-mouse-click on the '.exe' file that installs the XP-vintage program,

and select "Troubleshoot Compatibility", does Windows 7 offer to run the program in "XP-mode" ?

[GENEXPLOVER]

+

Very helpful to me. Maybe I should just create a very large drive on my virtual XP with Win 10. Then all I would have to solve is the "how to" to get my network access with the Virtual drive.

So I need to go back and learn how to set up the virtual drive from the word go and set one up with 500 GB hard drive.

Now there was another comment about running Win 7 Pro with XP vintage software and I am not sure if AutoCad and Carlson software will work in that system Also I run Quick Books Premium 2007 and the cost to upgrade these progams is over $6,000 dollars in order to run them on my Win 10 system. If I was not semi retired and was trying to grow a business my attitude would be very different but I just want to use software I already paid for to help out some friends on limited income. Maybe get a small job onece in a while to suplement my Social Security income.

Anyway you have given me some food for thought and I ill find a solution for my problem. Thanks.