64GB SSD on Windows 7

I read through some threads saying that Windows Vista is too bloated for a 64gb SSD to make sense. Has anything changed since Vista?

I am getting a T400s and as the hard drive seems to be a bottleneck in speed I want to get the SSD, not to mention that added battery life and reduced weight.

Usage will be mostly office programs, surfing and streaming video. Ill probably install two games (TF2 and L4D2) and have a movie or two on and no music as I have a 32gig phone.

 

Not sure what you mean by this. Anything that frequently accesses the hard drive - the OS definitely being one of them - should benefit from the speeds of an SSD, especially for things like startup and launching programs. Which threads mentioned this?

Brett

 

I meant in terms of the install size. I am more worried about not having enough space for my uses.

 

The last I heard, Vista will want 15gb max, so it depends on how much space you want for other programs and whether you'll have a second drive for other things. You'll also want to keep an eye on the pagefile size and possibly turn of hibernation. I don't see why 64gb wouldn't work, but you might have to be a little more careful of the install sizes of your programs...

Brett

 

I think he's talking about the infamous Vista folder that kept getting bigger and bigger in size as time passed. When I was using vista my installation folder went up to 25GB...(talking about vista alone). But now I'm running Win7 and it's around 15GB constant.

 

Vista will fit on a 64GB drive. That said, I was shocked to discover that I've already used 95GB on my Intel to get it where I wanted. This has no music or movies, though it does include a couple games. Vista is probably the single largest thing on the drive. I'm happy I sprung for the 160GB x25 (or really 150GB when formatted)

W7 takes less room than Vista for a lot of reasons. You'll have bare minimum 40GB for other stuff.

 

If it's 40gb then it should be fine.

 

Disabling System Restore backups in Vista will free up quite a lot of space. Otherwise you can reduce the maximum allowed size for the consolidated system restore backups.

 

64B SSD is plenty for Vista or Win7 plus many programs, with plenty of room to spare. How much total room you need depends on how much file storage on that "drive" you need.

My 128GB SSD with Win7 has a 54GB partition for software, with 25GB free. I have another 54GB partition for storage, which is plenty for my needs, but storage needs vary enormously.

 

I have run a 64GB SSD with Windows 7 for the better part of a year without problem. The main things that take up space is media (especially video), but there are a few other tweaks you can make.

1) Disable Hibernate - This will free up space on your SSD equal to the amount of installed RAM (4GB in my case).

2) Set swap/page file to a low minimum and high maximum. Default is RAM size with unlimited growth. I use a 256MB base and 8GB cap and have almost never seen it grow past 256MB. This will save substantial space and because the SSD experiences little penalty for fragmentation you don't need to worry about the page file getting large and smaller over a period of time.

3) Reduce the size of system restore. It serves a valuable purpose but can easily consume 5-10% of disk space if left unchecked.

4) Store large media files (if you have a lot of them) on a 2nd HDD in the Ultrabay, an external USB or eSATA HDD, or a NAS.

This approach works great for me and having 20-30GB free on my 64GB SSD is generally easy to maintain.

 

Fair enough, I guess I'm getting a T400s tonight.