Out with the old and in with the new!

My old AMD 4200 machine, with my much-loved Win XP64, was taking ages to load up all my photos in LR.

Over this year, I have drooled at posts from folk building their i7 machines and decided the time had come to get on the bus.

A wee phone call to eBuyer last week made a nearly £800 quid hole in my plastic and the goodies duly arrived.

Asus P8P67 PRO REV3.1
Corsair 120Gb Force 3 SSD
Intel i7 2600K
Corsair Vengeance DDR3, 16Gb at 1600Mhz
Antec Truepower 650W PSU
BeQuiet Dark Rock cooler
Antec case and a couple of LiteOn DVD Rewriters.

I already had bought a XFX Radeon HD 6770, bought from EMA747 a few months ago and had a couple of 1Tb drives to reuse.


Yesterday was a learning experience for me despite having built loads of PC's, all with AMD processors.

Intel CPU seating was a fiddle until I got the Foxcon doodah to fit around a nut.

Cooler was going fine until I saw it might be awkward to fit the first stick of RAM.
So wheeched in that stick, only to find the cooler fan fouled the RAM!
For a wee while it looked like a 12Gb RAM PC, however managed to reverse the cooler, with mm to spare for the fan cable connection.

This meant moving the case fans about to get a chance of proper airflow.

Everything else went OK, apart from googling to see if SATA3 was OK on SATA2, which just left the PSU to fit.

Now I have never used a modular PSU before (all my builds have used the cheapest of cheap PSU and been reliable) however, I let myself be convinced by advice here to go the extra mile.

Well there were enough cables to give Battersea Power Station a run for its money and a gym subscription needed to lift the bleeding thing!

Anyway, after much swearing, the build was complete and it was time to light the blue touch paper.

It came to life with only a gentle murmur and I was convinced the cooler fan wasn't working properly with my earlier cable stretching.

It turned out to be just the usual Q fan controller default in the BIOS.

OS Win7 was easy etc. etc.

A final look throught the posts here suggested I should wee on it to get the SSD to work. Fortunately Specsavers came to the rescue and another google explained what wei was!

Lots of software to bung on in the coming week but had a last trawl of posts to find that test jpg doodah and it did the test in 13secs. (a slight improvement on the days needed by my old machine).

No doubt I will try some overclocking in the weeks to come once everything has settled in.

Welcome to the club You'll wonder how you ever managed before once you've used it for a few days....

All the coolest people have 2600k

Lots and lots of freeze-ups today eventually traced to my old MS Multimedia keyboard.

Been on my old PC so long, it must have went in the huff with this new one!

It's been a fair old while since I needed to watch HDD space.

However, this new 120 Gb SSD has meant a wee watching brief.

I restricted my pagefile size, as I have plenty of RAM and lowered my restore space.

Tonight I noticed the free amount of space was still falling.

I disabled the Hibernation mode and got a whopping 13 Gb back!

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/windows-7-and-ssds-cutting-your-system-drive-down-to-size/2941?pg=3

You can set the page file to 2-4gb, mine hasnt expanded from 2 since I did that. You could disable it but some apps will throw a wobbler..

Yes I set mine from 1 to 4 Gb but was really amazed at how much space you could get from disabling Hibernation.

Annoying thing is it doesn't delete the file when you disable hibernate and you have to do it manually :-/

I just followed the instructions in the link, as I have 13Gb more, perhaps disabled is the wrong verb?

I've been running on a 128 Gb SSD for nearly a year now and have not done anything to save space apart from not using 'My whatever' folders much.

Last time I checked a couple of months ago I had over 50Gb free... and I still do, so being careful isn't that important.

i run a 60gb and dont have any major space issues.

means i can only install a game or two at a time though.

RobertP said:

I've been running on a 128 Gb SSD for nearly a year now and have not done anything to save space apart from not using 'My whatever' folders much.

Last time I checked a couple of months ago I had over 50Gb free... and I still do, so being careful isn't that important.

Click to expand...

I suppose it depends on the size of the SSD and how much software, data etc. you normally put on the sytem drive as to how important it is ?

I was down to about 48Gb free before I started using some of the info in that link.

That got me up to 60 odd Gb free, however I noticed it fell to about 58Gb free yesterday.

Stopping the hibernation got me up to 71Gb free which rather amazed me.

I thought I would share this knowledge here, important or not!

I thought I was going to have to watch the space on the C: drive and be faced with regularly finding out where the space was going and then getting it back. So I'm pleasantly surprised that I don't have to do anything of the sort.

My PC hibernates (well hybrid sleep which I guess is the same?) after an hour of not being used. Power button to up and running again is a couple of seconds so I wouldn't want to be without it.

i only install programs on my SSD so space isnt too much of a worry, data either goes on the 2nd disk (1tb) or the NAS (7.something tb)

RobertP said:

I thought I was going to have to watch the space on the C: drive and be faced with regularly finding out where the space was going and then getting it back. So I'm pleasantly surprised that I don't have to do anything of the sort.

My PC hibernates (well hybrid sleep which I guess is the same?) after an hour of not being used. Power button to up and running again is a couple of seconds so I wouldn't want to be without it.

Click to expand...

I think hibernation must be different from sleep, mine's still snores away.

I just tried it again to make sure and got myself a wee bit worried.

Neither the keyboard or mouse would wake it up, however a soft press on the pc's button brought it back to life

neil_g said:

i only install programs on my SSD so space isnt too much of a worry, data either goes on the 2nd disk (1tb) or the NAS (7.something tb)

Click to expand...

Yes I put all my stuff on a couple of 1Tb drives and try and keep software only on the SSD.

In fact this is how I started scratching my head at where the space was going.

I counted up all the stuff and it was about 44Gb, yet I only had about 48Gb free, on my 120Gb drive?

Mikesphotaes said:

I think hibernation must be different from sleep, mine's still snores away.

Click to expand...

Sleep is just turning everything off you can to enable lower power consumption whilst still keeping data in memory correct. Resuming from sleep is quick as it just re powers the systems and turns the clocks up. Hibernation is writing everything in memory to disk (hiberfil.sys) and turning 99% of stuff off. Resuming from hibernation takes a relatively long time as you have to repower the system and read memory state back from the disk. This will depend on the speed of the disk and the size of the memory to read back....