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OK, so we all know that the SSD has a limited (but lengthy) life span due to the nature of the device and it's architecture. We also know that Windows spends a good amount of it's time writing files to the C drive, filling up with temp files, cookies, update files and more.
So how do we reduce or eliminate this problem? Well, you can't make it go away, it's just how Windows works. But you can send it to the back forty! This will require an addditional SDHC card to occupy your slot. Think of it as a permanent solution, because if you make the changes below and then pull out your SDHC to swap in an MP3 collection, you are going to crash your system... I'm approaching these tasks as a systems admin, so if I get confusing, call me out on it and I will clarify.
Below, I will cover making changes to the following:
Assigning a permanent drive letter to an external device (SDHC but you could use a USB key)
Moving the Page File off of the C drive.
Moving My Documents folder off of the C drive.
Moving the Temp dir and tmp dir off of the C drive.
Move User Variables off of the C Drive
Other Considerations....
1: Assign a permanent drive letter to an external device
Right click "My Computer"
Select Manage
Expand Storage
Click on Disk Management
Identify your newly installed device.
Right click in the area next to the part that says Disk 0 or 1 or whatever. (probably Disk 1, as your built in disk is going to be Disk 0)
Select "Change Drive Letter and Paths"
Select your favorite letter and click OK, then click OK again to the warning about breaking programs.
Note: Any of the steps below can be done on a USB Key, but if you forget to install it when you boot, you will probably blue screen.
2:Moving the Page FIle off of the C drive:
Right click "My Computer"
Select properties.
Click on Advanced
Select "Settings" under "Performance"
Select "Advanced"
Under "Virtual Memory" click "Change"
Select your existing C drive and set it to "No paging file"
Select your newly assigned SDHC Drive letter and assign a value not exceeding twice your physical RAM.
Click OK.
3: Move My Documents Folder off of the C drive:
Right click "My Documents" and select properties.
Under Target, select "Move" and navigate to a new location on your newly assigned drive.
If you haven't created it yet, you can select Make New Folder.
Click OK.
Your files will be moved to the new location.
The "Target" window should now have your new location.
4: Moving the Temp dir and tmp dir off of the C drive:
In Computer Properties (right click My computer and select Properties), select "Environment Variables" from the Advanced tab.
Scroll down to TEMP and TMP and change both of these to a spot on your SDHC drive. Best to make a folder for these called, you guessed it, Temp and TMP! 
5: Move User Variables to new drive:
While in the Environment Variables section, edit both the TEMP and TMP values to poit to your newly moved location for your documents and settings if it hasn't already been done automatically.
Other considerations:
If you install Office 2003 or XP or 2007, and aren't careful during the install, the source files will be written to your C drive. Thats around 300MB of used space. You can either delete the MSOCache folder on the C drive or just move it to something like an external USB or HDD - useful if you need to make changes while on the road.
Windows Update....Oh yes.... This is the hidden zinger for this small drive. Every time you install a windows update (well 99% of the time), it dumps an uninstall folder in Windows root. These files vary in size from a hundred or so KB to a hundred or so MB...My current XP install has about 130 of these folders...You can delete these with no adverse effects, unless for some reason you need to uninstall a recent update.
Recycle Bin: WTF? Recycle bin? Yes. This will also fill up with all kinds of useless ****. You can do a few things here:
Set it to 10% or less of the C drive (I think 10% is the default). With the size of this little SSD, it will bug you often enough to empty it that it will be annoying.
Click the little check box that says "Do not move files to the Recycle Bin. Remove files immediately when deleted" This can obviously get you in trouble if you accidentally delete something.
Or you can just remember to do "Shift + Delete" when deleting files and it will permanently delete them for you.
Temporary Internet Files and cookies.
These will actually live in your My Documents folder. They aren't too big, but if you do a lot of surfing, you are going to want to delete them from time to time to keep your 2nd drive from wasting space. Mine is currently sitting at 132MB for cookies and 87MB for temp files. Seems like a lot, but when you have a third of a terrabyte for a drive, its nothing.
Open IE and select Tools, Internet Options
On the General tab, select Delete Cookies and Delete Files. Wait for each to complete. And remember, if you delete your cookies, all your session info from your favorite sites will go away. So don't forget your passwords!
It's getting late and I can't think of anything else for now. If you end up with XP on your machine, I highly reccomend these changes to not only speed your system up, but to preserver your disk by moving a lot of the busy work that Windows does to a different drive.
Good luck!
TB
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Good post.
Didn't I see a mod that had an internal SD card as well allowing for the existing slot? Used the USB ports I think. If so you could install a permanent swap file etc card and still have access to a removable card.
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Great info TB! I hopy you don't mind, I added that info to the Wiki in the section of installing XP, I think it should be there for future reference!
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Just some ideas....
Not sure if this will work on real XP but on NT/XP embeded (thin clients etc) you use wfilter http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms838511.aspx to intercepts all writes to the flash and stores them in ram (you can choose to write later if you wish)
If you have enough ram, perhaps consider disabling the swap file (I do this on my current dell laptop which boots off a 4gb CF card).
Temp files could be stored on a ramdrive, i have no experience of this outside nt4 embeded thin clients.
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Thanks! Good to give a little...I'm going to need the karma for when I start running linux on this little thing....
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I don't sure this will effect in mod-windows xp or not but ...
Normally pagefile is a part of memory. If you remove it while using it will end in blue screen. microsoft decide to prevent that by disable it. So if you Change Virtual Memory to any usb or flash card windows xp will just not using it. windows xp will not create "pagefile.sys", not page to that file in that drive and value of "total pageing file size for all drives" in performance option will not increase even after restart.
Last edited by put4558350 (2007-11-01 12:05:50 pm)
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Seems like a neat idea, but by moving the swap to the SD/SDHC Source I can imagine reading would be fast but wouldnt writing chunks of data to the SD be far slower than the internal SSD? or not?, because if not sounds good!
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TheBronze wrote:
Moving the Page File off of the C drive.
Moving the Temp dir and tmp dir off of the C drive.
I think these modifications might considerably slow down your computer. The eee pc's low RAM is pretty compensated by the fact that the swap file fun on the ssd at very high speed. Moving the swap file to another slow drive will likely make you realize that your system doesn't have 2Go of RAM.
Same comment for temp.
I think files that are accessed often by Windows (specially system process) should stay on the SSD for a system that runs at full speed.
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Yeah, but if they stay there and Windows is writing constantly, the flash drive in the EEE will last much less...
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so you cant take the SD card out EVER???? or just whem the machine is on?
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rozojc wrote:
Yeah, but if they stay there and Windows is writing constantly, the flash drive in the EEE will last much less...
This consideration is ridiculous. When the ssd will fail in 10 years from now, eee pcs will all be in museums of computer history 
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Pagefile.sys is not in memory. It is a chunk of space on a drive. Paging is the writing of less used RAM blocks to the hard disk until they are needed. You can put it anywhere you want to, or even have multiple page files. Here at work, we use a 2GB page for crash dumps on C, then we have an additional page file on a different drive for normal paging.
Without having the specs on the internal SSD vs the add in SDHC, its hard to say if moving the page file will slow things down or now. I would expect a good SDHC will do the trick nicely though.
As for the temp file, that can live anywhere; its just a repository for setup files and other misc items. Often times, a program will set up, use the Temp or tmp folder to store setup files and then not clean itself out. So, having this someplace else isn't going to hurt anything. Windows just needs to know where to put things.
And regarding the leaving it in question. If you assign all these system variables onto the SD card, you will have to have it in there when the sysetem is booted or running. When it is turned off, you can take it out no problem.
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I'm curious though. No really I am - you should see how I act.
Anyway, Has an estimation been done on how long the SSD will last under daily usage without the modifications to XP versus with the modifications? If it's something like 5yrs vs 7 yrs, would it be worth the effort?
I understand that it would be in the way that performance in general would be better.
I'm seriously considering this as a replacement for my field workers.
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At $400 a piece, and even if they only last 2 years (Doubtfull they will be that short lived), it would be a great way to go for field techs. But I would still go big on the RAM if you are putting XP on it.
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TheBronze wrote:
Without having the specs on the internal SSD vs the add in SDHC, its hard to say if moving the page file will slow things down or now. I would expect a good SDHC will do the trick nicely though.
The SDHC reader can function at half the speed of the ssd. Benchmarks results have been posted in this forum. Class 2, 4 and 6 have similar transfert speeds on the eee pc. That is why I think putting the swap file and other important files on an SD card can significantly affect performance. Also, Windows can be easily nLited to fit on the 4G ssd without any problem. If you move everything off the ssd, what will you be using the free space for? Now there are still people concerned about the numbers of writes that can be done on an ssd. From what I have seen posted on the web (a ppt from Microsoft amongst other things), the ssd life expectancy with normal usage is around 7 years if I remember correctly. It won't stop working after seven years, but it will start having sectors marked as "bad sectors" and thoses sectors won't be usable, reducing the amount of storage you can use.
How many people use a 7-year-old computer as their main computer anyway?
I'd rather have a very fast computer for a few years than the same slow laptop for 15 years
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If what you say is true, then I would say leave the page file on it for speed, and chuck the rest of it to additional storage if needed. Really though, if you can run it without a page file, thats gonna rock socks in the speed dept.
Regardless, I mostly put this up for folks who are going to play with XP on this and may not have the know how to fiddle with these things. I plan on keeping Linux but thought I might give back some
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You really want the pagefile 'virtual memory' on the fastest r/w source you have on any system... it's like having a small 10k primary disk and putting your pagefile on a 5.4k disk... defeats the purpose? or am I wrong with this statement?... as some say 'it's just virtual memory and does not matter for speed as it's slow anyway' but given the amount of times an xp system with a default amount of memory would call on the pagefile I would assume the fastest data source would be the way to go.
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virtual memory dosn't make for speed but make for system's stable (page file will used "only if" program need ram more than system have)
by allocate hdd for virtual memory on disk you will lost some space and get more system stable.
- If you don't run program that using ram more than system have page file will not used. it will not effect speed. but eat space.
- If you run program that using ram more than system have page file will used. and system get slower. but it will work regularly.
- If you run program that using ram more than system have. and don't used pagefile your program will not work regularly.
- If you run program that using ram more than system have + page file allocated size. your program will also not work regularly.
on windows 98 virtual memory's size change dynamically "that one" effect system speed. so fix virtual memory's size or removing it is good idea.
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TechKing wrote:
rozojc wrote:
Yeah, but if they stay there and Windows is writing constantly, the flash drive in the EEE will last much less...
This consideration is ridiculous. When the ssd will fail in 10 years from now, eee pcs will all be in museums of computer history
Oooops, I think you may be right and I am paying too much attention. I just did the Math!
See:
Aprox 100,000 writing cycles, which means you can write the complete 4 Gigas 100,000 times.
Assuming you write at a (normal, lets say) rate of 30 megas per second, you would take aprox:
4000 megas / 30 m per second = 133 seconds to write 4G one time
133*100,000=13,300,000 seconds to write it 100,000 times
13,300,000 seconds = 221,666 minutes = 3,694 hours = 153 days = 5 months.
So, IF you were writing ALL THE TIME, and IF you were writing AT 30 megas per second, it would take you 5 months of constant writing, to wear the SSD drive.
So, since a person is defintely not writing all the time, not even close, it will probably last over 5 years... Sorry if I scared anyone 
Last edited by rozojc (2007-11-03 11:22:02 am)
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Yes, the only reason to put the page file on an alternate drive would be to reduce wear on the built int SSD. If you want speed, keep it on the built in. Or just leave it out and boost the RAM.
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Just to clear up something for others who might read this thread. The best and fastest solution would be to turn off the swap file and work with just loads of RAM. With just 512MB of RAM, somebody using just one or two applications on a computer might get off with it. The problem is that you'll encounter system or application errors as soon as an application needs more RAM memory than what is available. If there is no swap file, the system can't flush unused RAM memory to the hardrive to free up RAM temporarily and allocate it to the application requiring RAM.
With windows XP, I estimate that if you have been using it for a while and have installed a few applications (antivirus, firewall, wireless setup panel, skype, acrobat, itunes, etc.) you would probably need 2G of RAM with a small swap file to get it running smoothly. The eee pc has only 512 MB, so swap file is in my opinion quite essential. The good side is that the ssd makes the swap file very fast as opposed to when it is writtent to a standard HDD. To me, the swap file process is so fast on the ssd that I can't tell the eee pc only has 512 mb of RAM when using it with multiple applications opened (which is absolutely not the case when the swap is on a hdd).
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for another angle, what would be the approx lifespan difference between an asus runnung xandros and one runnung xp under similar load?
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There is no way to tell.
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put4558350
heh if a pagefile is on slow media it will slow they system down as it is 'paged' by applications.. pagefile is used the moment the system has one, typically xp services sit in the pagefile.. it does not just get used once you run out of physical memory... that's the strangest thing i have heard of. it's used to keep more physical memory avaliable for client applications. have you ever matched physical ram and pf usage on any system? ... pf is always used if avalible by winxp.
perhaps in the days of windows 3.1 this was the case when win386.swp was only taken major advantage of in the instance of no physical memory hence when you hit your physical limit on that with several applications open the system would begin to page furiously from local disk...
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Normally windows will not used page file if the system isn't run out of ram
The way system work is actually do like this. once start windows will divide physical memory to small space it's call "page".
If program request memory more than physical memory have. windows will select a page, save that page to hard disk and overwrite old data in main memory by new one.
Not all page is save when it's kicked out. Page that not change (already up to date) will "not rewritten" to hard disk by using a check bit in main memory in every page.
confuse point ...
- Memory management program call Page that not need to rewritten "Free Memory". it actually used. but it don't need to rewritten in disk if it need to overwrite in memory.
- external memory management program work by force Page to update. by request a load of memory and then free it.
- Games run better if using external memory management program. but it's effect only small time when game just start. because game used much of ram and cpu. if Page already update. thay don't need time to save other program's page.
Other confuse point on xp ...
1. pf usage size in task manager = main memory + size of pagefile ... it's not go to zero even it you turn off pagefile.
Experiment on above
- Try set pagefile to zero
- check again in task manager
2. if pagefile exist xp services likely to stay in cache. but it's not alway stay there.
Reason
- pagefile's management idea like cpu cache. the way it select frequently used page will likely stay in main memory by it's design.
- xp services alway load but not frequently used so it's written in page by above condition. it's not assign to stay in pagefile. and when service run it need to load at less running part back to main memory.
* Windows will never used pagefile if system still have physical memory is correct.
** Dynamic size page file on 98 slow than fix size due to disk fragment.
Last edited by put4558350 (2007-11-04 11:57:15 pm)
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