JorgeA

jaclaz, Yup, my further reading on the topic yesterday (after posting) confirms what you said. Although apparently the introduction of the Trim command and similar utilities for newer SSDs did seem to tilt the balance of opinion slightly toward favoring putting the page file on the SSD. Still, though, as you noted, there is hardly a consensus on anything related to SSDs... except that they're really cool! B) For what exactly, I'm not sure yet... --JorgeA

Tripredacus, Wow, very impressive! Here's a link to a thread on another forum that may (or may not) shed light on your question about putting the page file on an SSD. And here's another one. There doesn't seem to be a clear consensus on whether using an SSD for a page file is either (1) worth more than the wear and tear that paging implies, or (2) at all helpful to performance even if one is willing to accept the wear and tear to the SSD. I'll be curious to know if you discover anything that decides either of these points! --JorgeA

Tripredacus, Sorry, I don't have an informative reply -- I just want to say that I have wondered the same thing as you, and it's a shame that nobody here has piped in with anything useful. SSDs seem to be most popular among hard-core gamers, so you may have better luck in a forum dedicated to that. In another part of MSFN, we recently conducted a series of Word file loading tests, where we conlcuded was that using an SSD would shave maybe a couple of seconds off the loading time; the real delay in loading seems to happen during file processing, and an SSD wouldn't help there. So the benefit of using an SSD remains mysterious to me: Since you can't start playing a game till the OS is loaded, does it really matter so much that the system takes 15 seconds instead of a couple minutes to get ready? Is it worth paying $150 or $250 or more just to be able to start playing a minute or two sooner? Maybe if your average playing session is 5 or 10 minutes, but otherwise... I'm sure I'm missing some important factor, but I've been looking for a good excuse to get myself an SSD and I just don't seem to be able to find one! I keep my PC turned on almost all the time anyway, so even the OS loading-time gain is mostly moot. --JorgeA

dencorso, You asked me to go through the Acronis documentation. I purchased the Western Digital Elements 1TB external HDD. Does that affect which software's docs I should be studying (such as, possibly, WD's own instead of Acronis)? I'm guessing here that the best thing is to read the documentation for the software that we'll actually be using, but I could well be wrong. --JorgeA

dencorso, That sounds good. Although I should warn that, more often than not, my wife has activities planned for us for the weekend. I'll try to work around that! --JorgeA

BlouBul, I suppose that we'll find out in about four weeks... Enjoy it while it lasts! --JorgeA

dencorso, Well, that's where I'm not sure how this image backup idea is supposed to work, exactly. The HDD is 500GB (or in reality, 454GB ) but only about 129GB of it is used. (The physical disk also has an 11GB D: recovery partition.) So depending on how the backup works, I could fit either two images or up to seven images. Explaining this stuff is where you come in. --JorgeA

Hi dencorso, Thanks for the explanation. I knew about the math part (it's still annoying!), but not the legal angle. As for how to format this external HDD (NTFS vs. FAT32), I think we'll leave it as NTFS because it's going to serve as a repository for images of my Vista HDD. If the time ever comes to install a really big external HDD on the Win98, I can get a whole new one for it. I'm thinking that maybe I can fit more than one HDD image on that 1TB drive, so that in theory I could have multiple places to jump back to if there should ever be a catastrophic problem with the Vista's HDD. I could do a monthly image, for example, and rotate (delete) the older ones out as new ones are created. --JorgeA

BlouBul, I couldn't find anything about it being freeware vs. a trial version. I guess that only shows up when you download it and look at the EULA, eh? There's some confusion as to what it is, exactly. They call it a free download, but on this page they describe it as shareware. A lawyer could argue that the two are not mutually exclusive, but in practical terms when you read "free download" you're not going to be thinking that you might be asked to pay for it. How long is the trial period, or is it one of those situations where you can use it in a limited-functionality state? Let me know how it continues to work for you. As for me, I do have .NET Framework 3.5 (though it didn't show up following the instructions they gave), but I couldn't find anything on my PC about VSTOR. --JorgeA

dencorso, Yes, you're right on both counts. Of course, that size billed as "1TB" is actually 931GB, but's who's counting? --JorgeA

Hey dencorso, Glad to learn you're OK! I guess that now it's your turn to be busy. I'll check the info you requested and get back to you. --JorgeA

Hey BlouBul, Thanks for the kudos -- but your find is even better!! Not only because it's free , but also because my find came through the MS Office Help, while you had to do some digging to find yours. Paid or free, this does sound like a pretty cool feature to add; I hate it when I have so many Word windows open that they get telescoped into one single spot in the taskbar, and then I have to go hunting for the one I need. I wonder how much the add-in would add to the file loading time... Good to hear from you again! --JorgeA

Peter, I entered "tabbed" in Word Help Search, and reached this page via Microsoft. It's an add-in feature, available for purchase after a free trial period. Apparently tabbed editing is not an off-the-shelf part of Word 2007. Hope this helps. --JorgeA

BlouBul, Congratulations, excellent! It's just amazing what kinds of deals you can find out there for technology nowadays. We'll now await dencorso's instructions. --JorgeA

Joe, Ahh, for the good ol' days of DOS. We used to be able to do all sorts of neat tricks. But modern systems do have their own tricks, and charms. Here's the link to the page where I'd found IE5 in German, back before starting this thread. (Scroll down to below the International Language Packages for Win32s.) I'm glad that I asked, because thanks to the folks on this forum I got a version of IE that's not only in English, but is also newer (5.01). --JorgeA

I think that is the latest , so you should be OK. BlouBul, Whew, that's a relief -- thanks! Pretty scary, that firmware bug. --JorgeA

BlouBul, The firmware version is HP26. What do you think? --JorgeA

BlouBul, Thanks for alerting me to this potential problem with the HDD. Using the information you provided, I looked it up and, fortunately, the Seagate utility tells me that there is no upgrade available and no action is required. The page says that my drive would have an issue to be addressed if the listing showed up in red, but mine appears in green. So it looks like I should be OK on that score. Nope, no difference. The readings all seem to be about the same as before. --JorgeA

hottext, Thank you for the link -- interestingly, at 12.3MB the earlier IE 5.0 seems to be actually larger than IE 5.01 at 8.9 MB. --JorgeA

FWIW, I once installed Win32 (many years ago) and it made everything so unstable I had to trash everything and do a fresh install. However, there is somewhere, a long, long list of what individual files you have to trash to uninstall Win32, but I didn't have that list at the time (nor do I have it now). Just a caution (albeit too late). Joe. Joe, Thanks for the warning! I will keep this in mind going forward. Luckily I haven't run into any problems yet, but it's good to know that they could happen. One of the MSFN supermods here, MDGX, may be the best source today for what would need to be trashed in order to uninstall Win32. --JorgeA

Hi BlouBul, Thanks, it's good to be back! It was an intense project, but fully worth it when payment arrives. I highlighted the C# file that you had me prepare, and made sure that everything in it was set as English. The "mark grammar erros as you type" is checked (turned ON). But the animation hasn't come back! As for checking the firmware on my HDD, I'm not sure how to do that. I opened Device Manager, right-clicked on the listing for the drive, and looked around the Properties, but nothing there jumps out at me as referring to "firmware." BlouBul, thank you VERY much for all the insight and investigation that you have contributed to this long discussion. I do hope that you won't step completely off the stage! --JorgeA

That will make a lot of sense if that is true . I just assumed (maybe very wrongly ) that JorgeA's animation and page counting run together in the fast tests like mine. If the animation is not complete, that will explain a lot of things. @JorgeA:When you get your fast results, is the animation complete? BlouBul, Since I'm no longer getting the animation, I can't test it directly, but IIRC in the slow loadings my animation would stop when Word reached the last page. Even in the fast loadings I don't think that the animation continued after the page counter showed the last page. If I can figure out how to get the animation back, I'll try this and see what happens. --JorgeA

BlouBul, I am back, and more relaxed with a big project out of the way, ready to start moving on this question again. I performed the tests you had outlined as above. Here are the results of the first series (open the C# file from outside Word, then open my big file from outside Word, and then open the C# file from outside Word again): 0:25, 3:28, 0:27. Next I created the test file as you requested, and then opened it from outside Word. The loading time was 3:34. All of these tests were performed with the grammar and spell checks ON. So nothing seems to have changed, except that I'm no longer getting the little animation at the bottom as the document is loading, even though I turned the two checks back on. O.K., on to the next step! --JorgeA

Hi BlouBul, Thanks a bunch for the new set of tests. I do get the sense that we're honing in on something, or at least slowly groping our way toward it. I'm not sure that I will get the chance to in the next couple of days, but for when I do -- the various tests you asked me to run in the first two paragraphs, should I do them with the spell/grammar checks on or off, or does it not matter as long as I'm consistent? I really appreciate your continuing to follow up on this! --JorgeA

BlouBul, Made good progress this morning, so I'm taking a break to get you some more data. Here are the results for opening my original big file from outside Word, with the grammar/spelling checks OFF: 2:37 2:25 3:24 2:35 2:57 2:24 3:52 One (possibly) interesting observation: In this series, the three highest values occurred when I had the MSFN Forum Reply box open, to prepare this post and input the results. The four lowest values all came about when I was on this MSFN thread, but not with the reply box open. What could THAT mean? Does the reply box consume that many resources? Sorry to throw in some pears along with the apples, oranges, and bananas, just at the time that I won't be able to participate for a while. We have a really messy fruit salad now. Maybe you all can run some tests opening the test file with the Reply box open vs. closed, and see if that makes a difference for you, too. I hope to be able to get in here again today. Otherwise, I'll talk to you on Monday. --JorgeA UPDATE: I got to run a series under the same conditions, but with the three checks turned ON: 3:33 3:27 3:28 3:31 3:23 3:31 4:44 The highest value was the last one I took. The only difference in circumstances was that during that file loading, an e-mail came in and I quickly replied to it. Otherwise everything was the same as for the other series -- I even stayed out of the MSFN Reply box.