If you take that approach you will never run vista gnome. You'll run xp now (still the best) and windows 7 in future (vista fixed up). You'll also be running win7 64bit because the drivers will finally have caught up so you might as well get the 10-20% performance benefit and all the memory you could want. Personally I'm running XP 32bit on an SSD with ewfmgr to protect and speed up the system partition and mft for maximum speed on program files/user data partition. Then a 500G hd for bulk files. I run the temp, page, firefox cache and trading apps on a Superspeed ramdisk -- which can support your page file and can use the excess ram that Win 32bit can't reach. Fast as lightning and almost as stable as unix. But I do have a Win7 x64 image for the SSD as well - good but still not compatible with all the apps one could want.
That is EXACTLY my plan. Not only for performance and compatibility reasons, but Microsoft tried to shove VISTA up my ass (and everybody else's too)... I resent that a great deal.
I like the Ramdisk idea, but what do you do about saving data? My rig writes data to disk intraday at selected intervals. I know I can save that data in a virtual folder, but if I forget to copy it to the disk before shutting down, or get a power outage, I'll lose that data. How do you cope with this?
Superspeed lets you specify a persistent image (saved to disk on shut down). As well as that I have a backup batch file which backs the permanent stuff to e: and also clears the temp directories while at it. I used to have that run every hour but power failures here are a once every few year thing - in fact I can only recall one in the last 7 years and my hardware is rock solid. So i probably save only twice a day when I force the machine to sleep - c:\deltree /Y s:\temp rdcfg -save r: pause rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll, SetSuspendState Standby This deletes the temp directories on S (which has them and the page file) and backs up the R image before going into standby. S is a non-persistent image (takes up 7 megabytes on the disk) of a 900M disk for temp and pagefile. R is a 350M image which saves my trading apps and data. This one does my sporadic file saves for R (so its available if I use the W7 image) R: c:\deltree /Y s:\temp XCopy R:\JSMonitor0.2b\*.* F:\R\JSMonitor0.2b\ /E /H /Q /C /Y XCopy R:\SierraChartO\*.* F:\R\SierraChartO\ /E /H /Q /C /Y Copy R:\Trades.xls F:\R\ /Y XCopy R:\OneNote\*.* F:\R\OneNote\ /E /H /Q /C /Y XCopy R:\Jts\*.* F:\R\Jts\ /E /H /Q /C /Y XCopy R:\SierraChart\*.* F:\R\SierraChart\ /E /H /Q /C /Y XCopy R:\FFProfile\*.* F:\R\FFProfile\ /E /H /Q /C /Y PAUSE If you want to run these in the background periodically you can do that with invisible scripts.
Tried an OCZ SSD last month on a new quad core system. XP booted in about 20 seconds and some activities were fine but the performance was really let down by the small-file random-write speed at around 7MB per second on a quoted 'up to 90MB per sec' write speed drive. I'm not interested in odd non-standard tweaks, so I sent it back and am much happier with a 500 GB WD caviar 'black' with a second removable SATA archive drive. Totally agree with all negative comments about vista. But it will run OK for an average user - with some basic tweaks. Just dumping Norton/Macafee will make an enormous difference to any machine (use Avira antivir - only uses about 10MB of system memory) Nobody likes microsoft, but XP Pro is the ideal for a trader. For trading software at least, forget Linux, Mac (piggy back XP if you already have one) and avoid vista if you can.
I have two desktops. One with XP and second with Vista. I have restore discs for XP. Would it be possible to instal XP on the Vista desktop from restore discs ? Do I need to delete Vista first ?
Maybe. Depends on the OEM of the restore set and the Vista computer. Deleting Vista often isn't so easy... Vista doesn't want to "let go" of the hard drive, but it can be done.
Hombre I don't think you have to delete vista, But formating always takes away any problem from before BTW I have vista and it works great. Of course you need lots of ram and super fast processor