Windows XP on an SSD?

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cheeseburgersnbeer

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My Dad is using XP for Web and e-mail. While I try to maintain a cleaning schedule, the system bogs down fairly quick.
I'm wondering if getting an SSD will make things easier, and faster.
Or is installing Win7 a better option. I know that if I install just Win 7 on the current system, he'll have access to IE9 or whatever the new IE is.
Though I'm pretty sure the websites he visits regularly, load up on the current IE window with no problems. If that is even an issue.

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc

web and e-mail

2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?

$0.00 - 100.00 usd. I guess the cheapest SSD that'll work with WinXP.

3) Which country do you live in? If the U.S, please tell us the state and city if possible.

NY

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. The word "Everything" is not a valid answer. Please list out all the parts you'll need.

SSD or Win7? Both would probably be the best solution, But I'm not sure there are funds for both items.

5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.

775 dual core pentium
Zotac itx board
2gb ram
nvidia on board video
some seagate 2.5 drive, 80gb. Even with Win XP, current updates and documents, the total usage is less than 30gb, I think.
FSP 300w
Lianli Q7

6) Will you be overclocking?

no

7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? What size is it?

1280 1024

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?

asap

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? eSATA? Onboard video (as a backup or main GPU)? etc.

no

10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit?

I have my own copy of Win 7, but I can't remember If I've used it two or three times. My last new pc install, the activation gave me a hard time. I ended up calling the automated phone activation and punching in the numbers.

Thanks everyone,
 
That entire computer is pretty dated. You need to be more specific though, that hard drive could be anything for all we know.
 
PC is old but, I'm not sure we can afford an entire system.

Specific? If you mean the Seagate laptop drive, it's just a regular drive purchased from newegg. Sorry, not sure what you meant by "the hard drive could be anything".
I can check for the model number later today if that helps.

Do you have an opinion about using a cheap SSD for win XP though?
 
like elite.mafia said, your system is pretty dated. win 7 will be more of a resource hog compared to xp. an ssd should increase your performance and will be better than the hdd you have regardless if its a 4200, 5400 or 7200 rpm hdd. overall 'quality of life' on using the machine will improve, however, if your dad's activities do not change then your system will continue to bloat and bog down.

keep him on XP, get an ssd, turn off defrag, get ccleaner and put that on a one week task schedule. then get the intel toolkit to enable TRIM support for XP. i'd also recommend turning off system restore, indexing and some other things. there are tons of guides on how to optimize xp after a fresh install.

make sure to tweak your xp settings to reduce total performance usage and you should be fine. with that being said, your dad might not even notice the difference if his websites load slow and other factors may come into play.

edit: if you do buy one make sure you get an ssd that is reputable. generally intels, and crucials are very reliable. also you probably should be looking at SATAII models since your pc probably does not support SATAIII. (something like the 80gb intel x-25m, or crucial c300).
 
SATA3 drives work fine on SATA2 controllers.

I wouldn't allow someone like your father to even use IE, can't you put him on firefox or chrome ?
 
Thank you for all the info everyone, this is a big help.
I've tried to get him to change browsers in the past, without much success. I can always try again.
Thanks again!
 
cheeseburgersnbeer said:
Thank you for all the info everyone, this is a big help.
I've tried to get him to change browsers in the past, without much success. I can always try again.
Thanks again!
Click to expand...

Install Chrome/Firefox, remove all the shortcuts to IE, and tell him if you see IE being used you won't help him anymore :p I had to basically do this with both my wife and daughter, because until the IE shortcut was gone, things were still getting through that should not have, so they must've been using it still. The rate of issues on those system decreased significantly once they were forced into Chrome.
 
One main issue about using XP on an SSD is partition alignment. If you're doing a new installation, use diskpar or a win7/vista install disk (or a current installation via diskmgmt.msc) to create your parition(s). If you've already installed XP and used XP to create the partition(s), you can use gparted to move/expand the first partition so it is aligned at 64 instead of 63. More info at AT: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2944/10
 
I think the problem isn't the browser, it's the user.
 
enginurd said:
One main issue about using XP on an SSD is partition alignment. If you're doing a new installation, use diskpar or a win7/vista install disk (or a current installation via diskmgmt.msc) to create your parition(s). If you've already installed XP and used XP to create the partition(s), you can use gparted to move/expand the first partition so it is aligned at 64 instead of 63. More info at AT: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2944/10
Click to expand...

This is good to know. Thank you for that.
 
Actually, though that system is a bit old, a SSD would greatly benefit a 775 C2D, even with only 2GB of RAM.

Though, nothing will save XP from being inefficient, if you can, definitely upgrade to Win7.
 
For web and email, XP running on a Core2 w/ 2GB of RAM should be more than sufficient.

BTW, with an SSD, he needs to be taught to not save things to his OS drive. You can make it easier for him by moving his MyDocs folder.
 
If all he does is web stuff, I would just add a bit more ram, and setup a small ramdrive for the IE/chrome/firefox cache. That would be faster/cheaper than ssd as far as the browser performance goes. There are free software options that work fine for this, I use/like Dataram's RamDrive.

You can set it to save a persistent image between reboots (adds ~15 seconds to my shutdown/startup times with a larger 2GB ramdrive), or set it to not save the image between reboots so the cache gets wiped each time, your choice.

BTW, with an SSD, he needs to be taught to not save things to his OS drive
Click to expand...
Meh with his usage I doubt it'll ever be a problem. It's harder to kill an ssd with writes than people give credit for, ongoing testing here
 
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