W520: Clean WIN7 install w/ UEFI and GPT Questions

Hi guys/gals,

I am new to the board and just took delivery of my W520 (2720QM/8gigs/500gig/1000M) last night and I have already increased the RAM to 16gigs and plan on ordering a Crucial M4 128gig SSD for it soon. I plan on running the BIOS in UEFI only mode and with a GPT formatted SSD drive. I have a couple questions about this setup.

I have been playing around with an old 60 HDD formatting it GPT and also putting the BIOS is UEFI only mode. My first question is should I leave the SSD drive as a simple disk or change it to dynamic? The other question is: I noticed when I loaded Win7 SP1 x64 on my 60gig HDD while in UEFI/GPT mode the install took a whopping 35gigs of space!! Is this normal for a Windows 7 install to use so much disk space on a GPT disk? Something just doesn't seem right, but maybe it's correct. I let Windows do the formatting of the drive during setup.

Anyway, any insight would be greatly appreciated!

thanks!
Paul

 

"should I leave the SSD drive as a simple disk or change it to dynamic? "

Like many computer question the anser is "that depends"

Will you want than 4 disks? Cant have them with simple disks but you can with dynamic disks. Windows backup seems to handle both dynamic and simple well but Acronis does not unless you buy an add on and that the only alnernate vendor I've tried.

Renee

 

I won't have a use for more than 4 disks. I am just concerned about performance. If it doesn't make a difference performance-wise I will probably just leave it as simple.

Can anybody answer the question I have about why the install was soooo big @ 35gigs when the HDD was GPT formatted?

 

if you disable hibernation, you'll get about 8-12 GB back. decreasing the page file that is running about 16 GB with your 16 GB RAM should also help (but not recommended). with hibernation disabled, i got about 16-17 gig just for windows. this includes the ~8gb RAM page file (not disabled, but hibernation is off). i also have system restore disabled and recycle bin size reduced to 500 mb.

btw, the install size doesn't have anything to do with the partition table. besides the 100 mb reserved in GPT, there shouldn't be much difference. it's your RAM and the associated hibernation and page file that makes it large.

 

thank you very much! I guess that does make sense, as I've never ran this much RAM in a system before.

In all my other systems I have built I can get a complete Win7 install to be about 18gigs in size and that's including ALL the software. I disable system restore as well but have never touched hibernation. If I recall correctly, hibernation has always defaulted to "off". I guessing it's maybe the power management settings in the BIOS that's causing Win7 to enable this feature by default...?

I will check this out when I get home and report back.

 

message deleted

 

hibernation is actually on by default. make sure you disable it running the following command so that the hibernation file is also deleted:

1) Run cmd as Administrator.
2) type powercfg -h off and press Enter.
3) Type exit to exit command prompt.