Another SSD Question?!

[Donmige]

Hello All, I did search for other questions similar to mine but dident find any; Ok, So I recently purchaesed a 60 gig SSD to run my operating system on my rig, I allready have a 1tb WD black edition holding all my other stuff with only 300 gigs left. So to do a complete reinstall of my OS is not an option, what I did is load a new install of windows on my SSD and set my bios to boot the new drive first. So its working now however since all my programs are in the prgrams folder and x86 folder of the windows version that is installed on my WD drive those programs wont come up on my start menue programs. I was wondering If I could mess with the directory or command line so that all those programs would show on my startr menue? thanks in advance for any info.

 

[sminlal]

I allready have a 1tb WD black edition holding all my other stuff with only 300 gigs left. So to do a complete reinstall of my OS is not an option

You just did a complete reinstall of your OS, so I don't understand why you say it's "not an option"...?

"Installing" a program (like Office, for example) doesn't just copy the files onto the hard drive, it also configures shortcuts, the Start Menu, registry entries, etc. inside the operating system so that, for example, Windows Explorer will know that when you double-click a "doc" document it's supposed to run Office in order to view and edit it.

So the mere fact that you have programs sitting on your hard drive isn't enough to be able to run them. You will have to re-install those programs into the new copy of Windows on your SSD in order to use them. When you do the installation you don't have to tell it to put the program files on the SSD - they can still go on the hard drive. But the installation is still necessary in order to configure Windows so that it knows how to run those programs.

 

[cadder]

What you did with installing a new drive will not allow you to access the apps that are on your old drive. You should reinstall your apps on the new drive and then they will work.

I have heard that there are utility programs that will transfer an app from one drive to another, including registry entries and so forth but I have no experience with them and I would question whether they will be 100% successful.

Your other option would be to buy or borrow a third drive, transfer all of your data from the old 1TB drive for safekeeping, delete the data from the old 1TB drive so that only the apps and OS remain, then clone all of this from the old 1TB drive to the new SSD. Once the new SSD is up and running with the apps on it you can copy your data back to the 1TB drive. This is not an easy process but it will work if you are careful and do it right.

A 60GB SSD will not hold a lot of apps in addition to the 1TB drive, so you might need a larger SSD to make this work.

 

[Donmige]

You just did a complete reinstall of your OS, so I don't understand why you say it's "not an option"...?

"Installing" a program (like Office, for example) doesn't just copy the files onto the hard drive, it also configures shortcuts, the Start Menu, registry entries, etc. inside the operating system so that, for example, Windows Explorer will know that when you double-click a "doc" document it's supposed to run Office in order to view and edit it.

So the mere fact that you have programs sitting on your hard drive isn't enough to be able to run them. You will have to re-install those programs into the new copy of Windows on your SSD in order to use them. When you do the installation you don't have to tell it to put the program files on the SSD - they can still go on the hard drive. But the installation is still necessary in order to configure Windows so that it knows how to run those programs.

what I meant was that reinstalling all apps and backing up all data was not an option because Its alot to do, I am beging to think that having the os on the SSD is not realy going to improve my PC considering that I was not planning to install my app/programs on the SSD I only wanted to have the OS and maybe 1 game that I could remove after I beat it and install a different game.

 

[cadder]

what I meant was that reinstalling all apps and backing up all data was not an option because Its alot to do, I am beging to think that having the os on the SSD is not realy going to improve my PC considering that I was not planning to install my app/programs on the SSD I only wanted to have the OS and maybe 1 game that I could remove after I beat it and install a different game.

It really depends on the app as to whether it is beneficial to be on the SSD. Most apps would load from whatever drive they are installed on, and after that they don't interact with the drive. So any app that takes a long time to load would obviously load faster but wouldn't run any faster. Most apps that I use load pretty fast anyway, but apps such as a web browser that want to read a lot of stuff from the hard drive would take longer. Our CAD apps take a LONG time to load, some of them like 30 seconds. These would benefit from an SSD. In addition they frequently want to load different DLL's from the hard drive. I notice that if I issue some commands that I haven't run in awhile, it might take 5 seconds just for the command to take affect and its dialog box to come up. And I'm running a very fast computer with the fastest mechanical hard drive you can buy. My next machine will contain a large enough SSD to hold the OS and my CAD apps.

I have a couple of laptops and I put SSD's in both of them. One is a small laptop with low voltage dual core CPU running at 1.6GHz, and it had a slow 5400 rpm drive. It was very slow to load some apps, but with the SSD it seems to be as responsive as my overclocked quad core machine with a WD Black hard drive.

 

[Donmige]

Well yesterday my pc started to freeze often I believe there might have been some windows conflictions since I had it installed twice. So that kind of put me over the edge and I went ahead and transfered all mata files on to an external hard drive and formated the hard drive and started from scrath, not to install all those apps again D: that 60gb SSD filled up quick, my next upgrade might be getting a bigger SSD, thanks for the info/help folks.

 

[Donmige]

Best answer selected by donmige.