Installing Windows 7 an SSD

A while back, we wrote up a piece on installing Windows to a solid-state drive and the reasons why everyone should at least consider doing it for the speed boost you’ll get from it.

Windows Vista:

Back then, we went through a list of reasons why Windows users might be better off using Windows XP than Windows Vista when it came to installing to an SSD, not least of which the fact that Vista, well apart from the fact that a lot of people just didn’t enjoy using it, wasn’t really built for use with SSDs.

Thanks to the fact that Vista wasn’t really made for use with SSDs, users who did opt to throw an install of it onto an SSD ended up seeing less of a performance boost than they might otherwise have. Moreover, because of the way that Vista uses the disk (which seems always assumed to be a standard hard drive) the OS itself can decrease the lifetime of the drive. It’s not a dramatic difference, but it’s something that most should be aware of.

So, in short, installing Windows Vista to an SSD probably isn’t the best idea.

Stock at the PUP

Hey there all, from time to time we like to update people on items that we have in stock at our Dublin Pickup Point (or the PUP). Basically, if something is really popular and doesn’t take up a monumental amount of space, we try to have a couple in stock locally to save people the trouble of ordering it.

At the moment, we have some items that we think people might actually like, some are a bit cheaper than the price listed on our web page too… so if you decide to buy at the PUP you’ll not only save yourself the trouble of ordering online, but you can just show up now and pick it up, saving you delivery time too.

We were most happy to be able to sort one of our Twitter followers (the ever charming @Shiminay) out with a hard drive when he was in a bit of a pinch yesterday, so with any luck we’ll be able to do the same for more people by telling you guys what we have available at the PUP.

Click through to check out our Corsair Voyager page

At the moment we have Corsair’s Flash Voyager for €19.50, a USB stick that (thanks to the helpful @Feylya) we’ve come to know simply as “The Battlestar” for a combination of its shape and extreme durability. We can’t advise you to do nightmarish things to it, but it is water proof… white water rafting while transporting important data is at last a possibility.

It’s something people like to see as local stock because somehow there always seems to be a day when someone suddenly realises a need for some removable storage.

Komplett Storage Roundup:

Hey there all, hopefully the week has started off well for you guys. We’ve had a lot of people asking us about buying extra storage on Twitter over the past couple of days and what might best suit their needs for X or Y purpose. We figured it might be best to do up a quick post with some of our best selling external storage and the circumstances they’re best suited to.

It might seem simple, but you’d be surprised the number of people who feel that they really need to go for a full 1TB of external hard drive when they’d be far better suited with something USB powered. That brings us neatly to the first product we’re going to talk about

Western Digital My Passport 500GB:

Western Digital’s Passport is a pocket-sized external hard drive in the same sense as you might remember “pocket sized” dictionaries from school; it’s a bit bigger than an iPod, but something you can easily carry around with you.

Click through to see our page for the Western Digital My Passport Essential

The Passport is ideal for those who just want to grab something to store extra media to free up space on a machine’s drive. It’s portable enough that you can leave it in a bag and not worry about it until you find yourself sitting around with an hour or two to kill.

It’s also excellent an excellent device to have handy for those media migration moments where you absolutely must (for one reason or another) move all of your music from one PC to another. The fact that its USB powered is really the best thing to recommend it.

Western Digital’s My Passport Essential is €91 for 500GB of storage, which is a solid deal for a USB powered drive