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raymac46

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My Acer Veriton desktop dates back to 2012 but it's a solid machine with a Sandy Bridge i5 and a pretty good motherboard. I've upgraded it a lot over the years - added memory, a new power supply, a discrete video card. Right now it runs Windows 10 Professional.

I'm hoping to keep it going for a few more years so I decided to do a final upgrade - a cheap Sandisk SSD.

After the easy-peasy experience with installing Linux on an SSD I have to say that doing the same thing with Windows 10 is a PITA.

My desktop case didn't have anywhere to screw down a 2.5 inch drive, so I got an adapter bracket that I could screw the SSD to and then it fit nicely into a tool less 3.5 inch drive bay - lots of those available. Then I had to hook up the SSD to a SATA III port and power it up.

Next I used my AOMEI Backupper program to clone the existing drive. The SSD is smaller than the original HDD. The first time I tried the clone it failed and the SSD wouldn't boot. So I reformatted the SSD and tried again. The second time it worked.

I have disconnected the old spinner drive for now and i"ll run off the SSD for a bit. If all goes well I plan to reformat the old drive and then transfer the Documents, Music and Pictures from the SSD back to the HDD to free up a bit of space on the SSD. Again you have to do that carefully within Windows so you don't screw up the folder access.

My advice is if you have a Linux and Windows machine, start off with Linux if you want to put in an SSD. You can get by with a much smaller and cheaper drive when you don't have to clone the whole enchilada.

Edited by raymac46
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OK all done. I reconnected the old HDD, reformatted it and transferred my Documents, Music and Photos back to it. Now I have plenty more space on the SSD and everything works.

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Hello,

 

Because Windows configures itself differently depending on whether its loaded onto a HDD or SSD, I always do a clean install of the OS and applications, then copy over any data. Sounds like you're set up, but you might want to check with AOMEI's technical support to see if there are any changes to make to Windows since it's now run from a SSD.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

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A clean install was not possible for me because I do not have a copy of Windows 10. All that is available is the OEM licence and the recovery partition. AOMEI has an option to optimize for SSD during the cloning process and from an inspection of the disk information Windows does recognize now that it is installed on an SSD.

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Hello,

 

If you took advantage of the free upgrade from Windows 8.1 or 7 to Windows 10 when that was going on, the Acer Veriton will have a valid e-license for Windows 10 that allows you to clean install Windows 10 as many times as you like on it. You can use the download tool at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 to build a bootable USB flash drive for the next time you're feeling adventuresome.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

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Thanks I'll take a look into getting a USB stick. I'm glad the cloning process worked out though. I have a lot of Steam/Train Simulator assets I wouldn't want to reinstall from scratch if I didn't have to.

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Hello,

 

You can backup the Valve data directory and copy it back to the SSD prior to reinstalling the Valve program. When you reinstall the game, point it to the directory with the game data and it will automagically use what's already present in the directory.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

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Thanks for your advice. Although I don't have many games on Steam the ones I have are quite massive in the number of files each one has. They are Train Simulators - not high paced action but rather rolling 3-D scenery while you drive a locomotive through it. The complexity comes in the number of different routes - UK, USA, Europe - and the variety of rolling stock. I have everything from 19th century UK steam to modern ICE trains. All of these detailed models have tons of graphics files that need to coexist and work together.

It's working OK now with a clone from my old drive. In fact a bit better. On an HDD the framerates were good with my video card but the need to load a new scenery segment now and then gave some stuttering in gameplay. This seems to be significantly reduced with the SSD.

The game itself is only a DX9 technology and with a GTX 950 card I'm getting framerates in the high 80s per second, so you don't need a beast of a video card to run it.

Edited by raymac46
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Hello,

 

I recently went through a system upgrade, and one of the things I did was move my G: partition (for "G"ames) off of my HDD onto its own dedicated SSD (1TB, leftover from a laptop upgrade, now 642GB full). After I got all the new system up and running, I installed the Steam client, pointed it to the new G: drive and had no trouble playing games from it. I can't say that I noticed any sort of massive improvement in the speed of games loading, however, this was done primarily to free up space on the HDD.

 

The only real issue I have is not having enough time these days to play more computer games. :)

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

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