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I have a laptop that was given to me with a bad hard drive. I was able to help the guy at work get his pictures off the old drive by slaving it via USB.

I cleaned up the laptop, and did not have any decent size drives, but I remembered I did have a 70 gig SSD that I bought earlier this year. I formatted it with XP using default settings.

After doing this, it dawned on me that I should have read up first before installing XP on it. Reading some web sites, I should have installed it as a slave drive in win7 and formatting it with NTFS. Then remove it and install XP.

Should I be worried about this? I don't plan on keeping the laptop. It came with Vista which I can't stand and I had a spare XP disk laying around.

It'll work fine, it just won't be optimized for best performance. SSDs need to have the partitions aligned for best performance. Win7 and up does this automatically. XP doesn't. Even so, it'll still be ripping fast.

I made an image and installed the image on a standard HD that I found while looking for some software.

If I remember correctly, you can align the drive even after the OS is on there. Though it could take awhile and there might be issues.

If the computer is old enough it came with Vista, I doubt aligning it would really make that much of a difference anyways.

ZYFER wrote:If I remember correctly, you can align the drive even after the OS is on there. Though it could take awhile and there might be issues.

If the computer is old enough it came with Vista, I doubt aligning it would really make that much of a difference anyways.

Yeah with Vista, but XP runs so much better on this considering it has only 1 gig of ram. Hard to believe someone had patience with Vista and only 1 gig of ram.

What about these instructions:

Click "Start," "Control Panel," and "Device Manager."

Click on the "Disk Drives" menu, right click your SSD, and select "Properties." Click "Polices" and uncheck "Enable write caching."

Click "Start," "Run," type "regedit," and press "Enter."

Open the following folders in order: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE," "SYSTEM," "CurrentControlSet," "Control," "Session Manager," "Memory Management," "PrefetchParameters." Set the "EnablePrefetcher" key to "00000000."

Open the following folders in order: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE," "SOFTWARE," "Microsoft," "Dfrg," "BootOptimizeFunction." Set the "Enable" key to "N."

Open the following folders in order: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE," "SOFTWARE," "Microsoft," "Windows," "CurrentVersion," "OptimalLayout." Set the "EnableAutoLayout" key to "00000000."

That doesnt align the drve, it just turns off features that aren't needed for an ssd. A realignment involves moving the start and ed of the partition. It can be done with a partitioning tool. Just Google ALIGN SSD FOR XP.

Like I said, though, won't really affect performance much on an older system.

The bigger issue is lack of TRIM support in XP. Without TRIM, the drive will get slower over time. Most SSD manufacturers have a TRIM utility for XP.