Help with new m4-256 in old XPS1330 - slow

I have a Dell XPS1330 laptop (April 2009) that came with a Samsung RBX 120GB SSD, 4GB RAM and a 2.2GHz dual-core Intel CPU. It has Vista Ultimate 32bit installed plus the usual office apps etc. It is used daily for browsing, Word, Excel - the ususal office type stuff. It takes over 4 minutes to boot to the desktop, much longer than when new, it gives reasonable performance once booted though. The 120GB disk was pretty full and I kept having to clear space so I invested in a Crucial m4 256 ssd. I backed up the old disk (complete system) using the Vista backup utility to a USB HDD, swapped in the m4, booted from a Vista CD, ran the Windows Repair and restored the backup from the USB HDD.

This worked in that the machine boots and works OK, but it is still taking over 4 minutes to boot. I have turned off just about every optional app to stop it loading at boot up - so no iTunes, Google Desktop, etc. I do have McAfee AV, WHS connector and a Bluetooth mouse driver but these have always been there. I think that this is just the old known issue that any Windows install gets clogged up and slow after a a couple of years.

In which case, should I re-format the m4 SSD and do a clean install of Vista (or maybe take the opportunnity to upgrade to Win 7) and do you think that this will provide the normal 1 minute of so boot times that I would expect from this laptop/SSD combination?

Any other ideas as to how I can recover to a more reasonable boot time?

 

I'd definitely do a fresh install of windows on the SSD. 4 minutes is ridiculously long. With your machine, i'd say a boot up in about 45-50 seconds would be reasonable with the M4

 

A fresh install with Windows 7 as that OS is better equipped to handle an SSD.

 

Fresh install will clean you up fine. 4 minutes is ridiculous even on a mechanical hard drive...Windows never was great at cleaning up after itself, no matter what you try...

 

Clean install Win7x64 (you can demo it for 120 days legally), but first - format it in the Windows Install setup screens (this will force a TRIM) - then install normally.

With the O/S, Office and maybe a burning software (Roxio, for example) installed: you should be booting in less than 30 seconds (even with the Samsung SSD).

Search the forums here for legal Win7x64 with SP1 download links and take it for a test drive. Install all the Drivers that Windows Update cannot find by itself, but don't install all the bloatware that Dell tries to cram down your throat.

Good luck.

 

Thanks for the advice tilleroftheearth, I'll keep this in mind when I upgrade to an SSD.

 

Many thanks to all for the advice. Looks like a clean install is the way to go so that's my weekend planned

 

on my old vista pc, turning search index service off makes a big difference.

 

When I recently got my SSD (Samsung 470 256GB), I just happened to clone my then current drive (Seagate Momentus 500GB) only the OS partition, which was 200GB, so I did that without a hitch.

Should I not have done that? Also, beforehand, I was running a fresh install via the Upgrade Disc but if I do a clean install again, will I not be able to enter the key again?

 

The key should still activate. I used an upgrade Win XP disc to do many many clean installs on the same system (~15-20). Never an issue. Worst case you call up MS when it rejects it and tell them the deal.