I started thinking I’d get an SSD to put into my Lenovo Thinkpad X200 laptop. That seemed to make the most sense based on lower power use and the silent running and zero vibration.

I started doing my research by looking into the cheaper drives because I’m all about finding the best bang for my buck. My first assumption was that most likely all SSD’s are pretty much alike and there really wouldn’t be much difference.

I was proven wrong. After trolling through dozens of lengthy reviews with specs, the general consensus was that the cheaper drives seemed to have a lot more compatibility problems and often didn’t perform as well in speed tests.

I settled on the Intel 80gb X25-M SATA SSD. I would have loved to have gone for the 160gb version but at around twice as much, I decided I should go conservative since, if it sucked I didn’t want to be out the extra money. The Intel drive seemed to get the most solid reviews and wasn’t dramatically more expensive than the cheaper competition. Everyone seemed to say the same thing, this drive is lightening fast and rock solid.

Once I ordered the drive and was waiting for it to arrive, I kept on reading reviews and more and more started thinking about putting it in my desktop as the system drive instead of my laptop. My desktop was already set up with one drive for Windows 7 and my programs and a second one terabyte drive for my data, so the system drive really didn’t need to be that large.

I am running a four year old Dell Dimension 9200. This machine was pretty bad ass when it was new but it is getting pretty long in the tooth compared to its modern equivalents.

Don’t get me wrong, it has a Core 2 Duo dual core processor and 3gb of ram, which aren’t bad specs but it is not as fast with Windows 7 and the latest apps on it as it was when it was running Vista and the last generation of apps.

It’s especially noticeable when waiting for the machine to fully boot up. If I have a lot to do, I dread having to reboot my machine as I know I’ll be staring at the screen waiting for everything to get loaded for a while.

The drive finally arrived, courtesy of UPS and I popped it out of the box. The cool thing is that the drive is the standard size for a laptop hard drive, but it comes with an adapter bracket so that you can easily install it in a desktop as well. It has standard SATA connectors on it for power and data so you don’t have to do anything special or buy any extra parts to get it to work with your machine – either laptop or desktop.

Now I needed to install it into my desktop. I decided to use Norton Ghost to copy my existing desktop system drive to the new SSD so that I wouldn’t have to reinstall and reconfigure everything.

In order to get ready, I decided to free up space on my system drive by moving the page file from C: to my second hard drive which is D:. I also ran disk cleanup in Windows 7 to get rid of about 5gb of temp files, etc. When all this was done, I was at a comfortable 50gb of used space on my system drive, which would give me plenty of breathing room on the new 80gb drive.

I installed Ghost on my desktop, then took out my USB to SATA / IDE hard drive connector and plugged the SSD into a free USB port. I then fired up Ghost, set it to do a drive – to - drive clone from my existing C: drive to the new SSD drive. The copy took several hours to finish. Once it was done, I opened up my machine and swapped the two drives without an issue.

Upon powering up my machine with the Intel 80gb X25-M SATA SSD drive as my new system drive, I got a fatal boot error saying that windows couldn’t find some startup files. I fixed this in about 5 minutes by putting my Windows 7 installation disc in and booting off of it. When the setup screen came up, there was an option to repair windows. I picked it. Setup did a quick scan and reported that it found problems with my boot configuration and asked if I wanted to let it repair the issues automatically. I clicked ok and in less than a minute my pc restarted and  booted off of the SSD.

Now, for the interesting part. Before I swapped the drives, I decided to write down the boot time with the old drive and compare it to the new drives times. With my old system drive it took my pc 1 minute 31 seconds to get to the login screen 2 minutes and 44 seconds total boot time after the login screen before I could launch Internet Explorer and load a web page. With the old drive the Windows Experience Index (which rates your computer’s performance and can be found by right clicking my computer and choosing properties) showed hard drive performance at 5.7 out of a maximum score of 7.9. Not too shabby.

After I installed the Intel 80gb X25-M SATA SSD, my boot times became 48 seconds to the login screen (half the time!) and 1 minute 5 seconds total boot time to launching IE and loading the same web page (about one third of the total boot time that the old drive used!). The Windows Experience Index suddenly rated my hard drive performance at 7.6 out of 7.9 total possible score! Basically, Windows thinks there’s little to nothing out there that’s faster than my new drive.

Keep in mind that this is with the exact windows installation I had before since I cloned the drive so this really is an apples to apples test.

The only other configuration task left after the swap is to install the Intel SSD utility that runs some optimizing routines on your drive from time to time.

I’ve now been running this configuration for over a month and can only report that it is still amazingly fast. I had been contemplating buying a new pc soon since this one was getting slow but with the new SSD drive, I have no reason to upgrade for the foreseeable future.

Technorati Tags: 9200, Dell, Dimension, Drive, Hard, intel, sata, SSD

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I have a Windows Home Server and my main machine running Windows 7 (Dimension 9200) which both have gigabit network cards in them. I thought it would be awesome to have a gigabit router which would allow me to copy very large files between machines at super fast speeds. This is where all of my trouble began.

My shiny new WNDR3700 gigabit router is delivered and I am psyched to get it online. I power it up and start connecting my machines. First, my Windows Home Server which is running on a Dell Optiplex GX620 slimline. I connect it and watch the router port light turn green which means it’s connected at gigabit speed. Sweet!

Next I connect my Dimension 9200 and watch as it blinks green a few times then promptly switches to an amber light which means it’s connected at 10/100mb. What the hell?

I check my router settings and make sure I’m running the latest router firmware just to rule out a router issue. I even pulled out a gigabit switch I have to see if the machine would connect to that at 1000mb. It would not. That rules out my new router.

So my troubleshooting begins. My first logical thought is: Oh! The Network cable I’m using is only CAT 5, which doesn’t support gigabit! So I swap the cables with my Windows Home Server that IS connected at gigabit speeds. Well that didn’t do it.. as a matter of fact the home server still connects at gigabit with the CAT 5 cable (turns out it was CAT 5E which does support gigE) and the Dimension 9200 still comes up amber even with the “good” cable.

Crap!

Next I try checking the NIC speed and duplex settings. They are set to Auto Negotiate by default, which is connecting at 100mb/s. I decided to force it to 1000mb/full duplex. The green gigabit light on the router blinks several times and then goes dark. No joy!

I start googling the issue to see if anyone has a quick fix. I can find only one reference on a Dell forum talking about the problem. Some people on that page said they fixed the issue by going into the NIC’s advanced properties and forcing the gigabit master / slave mode setting to “Force Master Mode”. I check mine and don’t have that option anywhere. Apparently my original version of the nic driver doesn’t have any of the real advanced options.

So I promptly head off to the Dell Downloads page for new drivers for my machine. The first thing I noticed is that there is a new version of the BIOS for the Dimension 9200 (ver. 2.5.3). The description of what the new BIOS does sounds like it’ll fix my problem: “Improved NIC Compatibility in Gigabit network environment.”! Sweet! I’ll be in gigabit land in no time!

So I download and install the new BIOS and… nothing. It didn’t change a dang thing.

So next I check the network card driver… I notice that the one on Dell’s site is more than a couple of years old as it’s from 3/30/2007. I am currently using the generic Microsoft driver courtesy of the Windows Update website. Considering it’s an Intel network card, I decide to head over to Intel’s website to see if they have updated drivers. I found this driver auto update page on Intel’s site. They ended up detecting my Intel 82566DC nic and had a newer driver for it.

I downloaded the driver, but before installing it, decided to get rid of the old one. I opened Device Manager by right clicking Computer and choosing Manage. When the Computer Management window came up I clicked on Device Manager, then double clicked Network Adapters, which showed my currently installed network card.

 To uninstall the current drivers, just right click the network card and choose Uninstall. A confirm uninstall prompt comes up (see picture below) with a check box to delete the drivers the device is using. Check the box and click “OK”. Remember that when you do this, it will knock you off the network so make sure you have already downloaded the new drivers from Intel to your hard drive and remember where you saved them.

After installing the new driver, I was hopeful that the gigabit connection would just start working. My hopes were dashed after a reboot.

 The good news was now the advanced options were available. I promptly changed the gigabit force master mode option and hit apply… No joy.

As you can see in the image above, nothing I tried could get the nic to connect at gigabit speeds. At this point, I googled everything I could think of and tried changing a lot more settings including getting a CAT 6 ethernet cable. In the end nothing has worked. considering a lot of the posts I’ve seen on the web imply this is a known, sporadic issue and my machine is out of warranty with Dell, I don’t think it’s worth my time to try to resolve this anymore.

Instead, I have opted to buy the Intel Pro 1000 GT NIC card (which is a bargain at about $35) and a batch of CAT 6 cables to replace my aging CAT 5 cables.. I have installed several of these nic cards at client’s offices with gigabit connections and never had any issues. They just work and that is what I need.

I will still be watching for any updates or possible fixes for this issue as it bugs me to no end to not be able to resolve things like this, but at least I can move on now that I’ll be looking at the green gigabit connection light on my router and watching my copies fly across my network!

Are you having the same issue? Have you found a fix or a work around? Let us know by adding a comment below!

Technorati Tags: 82566DC, 9200, Dell, Dimension, gigabit, intel, netgear, router

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 In the old days, you pretty much expected that when you got a new gadget or piece of software, that it would be painful, if not impossible to make it work with your old technology. Nowadays, it’s pretty much the opposite. New wireless networking hardware almost always works with what’s existing. The new version of USB works with the old. The new versions of software generally work with the old.

This is why I’m currently rather annoyed with the next generation of the SD flash memory cards called SDHC or Secure Digital High Capacity. I got a new Canon Rebel T2i digital camera for Christmas. To go with it I bought two Kingston 8gb SDHC cards from Amazon as they were on sale for about $15 a piece.

I popped my new cards in my camera and took a bunch of Christmas pictures. All went well until I tried to take the card and pop it into the built in card reader on my new Dell Dimension 9200 computer with a 19-in-1 TEAC media card reader. My pc started acting buggy and wouldn’t read the card.

I started trouble shooting, rebooted the computer, reseated the card, etc… all to no avail. I took the card and popped it into the built in card reader on my Dell 2405FPW monitor. Same result. I test other cards I have in both readers and they work fine. Time to turn to google.

The long story short is that the SDHC cards, while identical to SD cards physically, use a completely different format for reading and writing data and are NOT backwards compatible with SD card readers or devices not specifically programmed to recognize SDHC.

Who the hell does this anymore?? So now I’m miffed at Dell as they have no updated firmware for either the reader in my new PC nor the reader built into my monitor, I’m miffed at TEAC for not creating the firmware, and I’m miffed at whatever genius came up with the new SDHC standard and didn’t bother to let anyone know that it won’t work with legacy hardware.

Now I have had to by a new (THIRD!!) card reader just to read these cards and will now have an extra piece of basically unneeded hardware cluttering up my desk. Meh!

The good news is that I found the Kingston MobileLite G2 Card Reader for about $20 on amazon. You can drop in several different types of flash memory cards into it, pop it into a USB slot, and it will act like a thumb drive. Two devices in one, basically. The nice thing is that it also comes with an 8gb SDHC card for free. 

 **UPDATE: JawnyG found a  new firmware update for the built in card reader on the Dimension 9200. Still no hope for the 2405FPW monitor though. Thanks JawnyG!

Technorati Tags: 2405FPW, 9200, Canon T2i, Dell, SDHC, TEAC

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