Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

Of course, when installing any given software, you can choose to install it in C: or D: or E: and this had better work! I agree that trying to relocate stuff that you have already installed to C:\Program Files is a terrible idea.

I didn't realize that Win7 took up so much disk space! You're right; my Win7 Pro installation takes up 76% of the 30GB partition I gave it.

Here is how I laid things out on the SSD (numbers are heavily rounded so won't add to 64GB):

• 2GB for Linux / (50% full)
• 28GB for Linux /usr (38% full)
• 2GB for Linux swap
• 30 GB for Windows C: (76% full -- uh oh)

and on the physical hard disk:

• 66MB for Dell Diagnostics
• 4GB for Linux /var (20% full)
• 25GB for Linux /home (40% full -- but that's all copied from my last laptop)
• The rest (460GB) for a big data partition (66% full -- copied from my last laptop) shared by both OSs and formatted as NTFS

With my previous 32-bit WinXP laptop, with much more stuff installed on my C: drive than I have so far installed on the M4500, the drive had much more free space. I didn't realize that Win7 took up so much disk space.

After I actually install everything I'll use, my C drive will be pretty full or possibly 100% full. Ouch. Hopefully I can hang on until 128GB mSATA cards are available and affordable. The alternative is just moving C: to my physical drive (and I suppose giving that extra space to Linux), which would work acceptably for me but not for everyone.

 

Yes, that's true. However, C:\Program Files affords you some additional protection of the files stored there, and filesystem virtualization only works for folders in C:\Program Files. That's not necessarily a big deal, unless you have an application that is not fully Windows-compatible, and assumes it can write user files into its installation folder. There are still a few of those out there, but they are getting fewer, thankfully.

 

HDDErase


Did you manage to scure erase your SDD with HDDErase under Precision m4500? I guess I tried every possible way...

Anyone succeeded?

 

Ah. I am clearly unfamiliar with the changes in the post-Win-XP days. I appreciate your patience and willingness to explain. In fact, I have a small legacy app that writes user settings into C:\Program Files (bad, bad, bad legacy app) that I'm hoping I can abandon. We'll see how lucky I get.

 

I ran CrystalDiskMark on the Dell Samsung 64GB mSATA Card and a Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM drive

Dell mSATA results:

Seagate ST9500420AS results:


Samsung 64GB mSATA SSD MMDPE64GEDXP-MVB Performance
Sequential Read Sector: Up to 220 MB/s
Sequential Write Sector: Up to 85 MB/s

The difference in system performance is extreme. No wonder Dell offers this option.

 

FWIW,

For Win7 systems, if more space is needed on the 64G mini-SSD and hibernation is not used, the powercfg.exe command-line utility can be used to disable hibernation and remove the hiberfil.sys. More specifically:

Command help:
powercfg.exe /?

Disable hibernation:
powercfg.exe -Hibernate OFF

After a restart, the hiberfil.sys file will be removed (i.e. automagically deleted by the system).

The size of the hiberfil.sys correlates with the amount of RAM installed in the laptop. For laptops with 8G of RAM, a significant amount space can be recovered on the mini-SSD.

The hibernation function can be restored with the following command:

powercfg.exe -Hibernate -Size 100

Executing this command will re-create the hiberfil.sys file. Sufficient space must exist on the operating system partition. After re-enabling hibernation using powercfg, it is usually necessary to then use the control panel Power Options applet to re-enable sleep and hibernation for each and every power scheme (as needed).

Powercfg.exe can also be used to duplicate existing power schemes. This is handy for creating variants of an existing scheme. It can also be used to determine which devices are armed to wake up the laptop.

 

Got an i7-820 model from Dell today to replace the prior defective one and it is working great. About 5250 on geekbench and it completes an hour of OCCT torture test at under 90C.

 

Note that there is no requirement for the paging file to be on the same partition as Win 7. For example, my system is quadruple boot on a 320 GB HDD. As far as partitions are concerned that are visible to Windows:

C:\ is the SYSTEM partition for both Win XP and Win 7 - note that the SYSTEM partition is NOT the same as the WINDOWS partition. This is just a small FAT partition, but Windows needs this for its boot loaders and some other boot related stuff. There is also a C:\Program Files here for legacy software that has the program directory hard-coded.

D:\ is my Win XP partition, this also has pagefile.sys

E:\ Windows data partition

F:\ Windows 7 - Win 7 shares the pagefile.sys on drive D:\

The setup above works beautifully and requires only one pagefile for two Windows installations. It also shows that you could put your pagefile.sys on a HDD while still installing Windows to the SSD. Unless you frequently run into situations where your system starts to swap, this makes perfect sense.

hiberfil.sys - why would you want it? Unless you have a rare configuration in which suspend does not work, disabling hibernate support does not seem like any kind of loss to me.

If you use one or both of the above, you can easily cut your Win 7 partition down to something that fits comfortably into 64 GB.

 

From one very old guy to another, thank you for the tip!

 

I'll start playing around with moving the page file and disabling hibernation. Please post some tips on how to go about moving the pagefile.sys

With the SSD ability to boot so quickly, there really is no need for hibernation.

Thanks!