For most of this "review", I'm going to specifically concentrate on the installation of the KingSpec SSD to my [relatively] ancient Acer "ultra-light" laptop. But part of this review is *definitely* going to be generally useful to anyone contemplating upgrading an older PATA based machine (including, lol, probably at least one reviewer who reported performance problems with his XP install after a few months had passed).
I figure that almost anyone even thinking about doing something like this is probably pretty technically adept already, so my primary purpose here is less in recommending the drive itself (and, I do recommend it) than to detail specific details of my own machine upgrade. And to include some generally useful procedures (new "tricks" whoo-hoo) for doing this sort of upgrade.
...if you weren't a relatively experienced DIY'er, you probably wouldn't be bothering with something like this.
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SSD BRIEF REVIEW:
As for the Kingspec SSD itself? - Well, it's a good price for a relatively rare beast. PATA SSD's aren't ever going to be all that common ...it was just luck of the draw that I took this over the Transcend version I was also looking at.
To cut to the quick, I'd buy another Kingspec in a heartbeat, and I have no problem in recommending it. (I have five other machines with SATA SSD's btw, so I'm not exactly a noob' regarding their care and feeding.)
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SSD DETAILS:
I had no dimensional fitment issues:
_1. the SSD was *exactly* the same size in every dimension as the OEM Seagate Momentus 4200.2 (Mod. No. ST960821A) I pulled out of the drive tray
_2. the SSD bolted to the drive bay as expected
_3. the tray assembly subsequently slid into the laptop HDD drive bay perfectly
_4. the SSD pins plugged into the internal PATA connector smoothly
_5. there were no clearance issues whatsoever
I had no BIOS-related issues: the Kingspec was immediately picked up by the [old] Acer BIOS. (The drive jumper came set to the typical "master" setting that a boot PATA drive should be set to ...it's been awhile since I've seen one of those lol.)
I have had no performance issues for the few days it's been running (and I will follow-up if I ever do) ...I've observed the performance is significantly better than the Momentus it replaced (in W7 WEI, the SSD has a 5.9 rating ...so it's easily the fastest HW component in the little Acer lol ...uh, there's no "WEI" in XP, so all I can say is that the OS boots faster, the laptop resumes from hibernation - and sleep mode - WAY faster, and applications and the like load way, way faster).
Battery life seems the same (although at this point, both the batteries on the Acer are - unsurprisingly- in dire need of replacement); I just don't have a good baseline of comparison here though, so YMMV.
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BACKGROUND:
I purchased a 3002WTCi [ultra-light] as an onsite laptop in late summer 2007 ...it was a faithful and invaluable asset for onsite work (I'm a sys admin with 30 plus years experience) for over 3 years. After that, it did yeoman duty for another couple of years plus as a "bedtime companion", to catch up on the news and blogs late nights - I have minor insomnia - before I finally bought a 'droid Nexus tablet. The little Acer has pretty much sat on a shelf since then.
The Acer originally came with a 64GB Seagate HDD that was partitioned into two 30GB logical drives ...one partition was still empty, and the boot partition was about 75% used with XP and MS Office and the various software utilities and files I found it useful to carry with me to onsite locations. So I was pretty sure the 64GB of the Kingspec wasn't going to pose any capacity limitation issues.
I'd thought about upgrading it with an SSD for several years, but it was hard justifying the expense (especially when I started to use it less). Plus, the techie community consensus seemed to be that the performance of a PATA SSD wasn't exactly all that much of an upgrade. (And finding PATA SSD's was no piece of cake a few years back, either.) Regardless, that was then, and now is now, and I've my own SSD experiences to draw upon ...and at least as far as price (and aforementioned capacity), the Kingspec at 64GB wasn't going to be much of a budgetary hardship.
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OS UPGRADE:
I decided that even though there's absolutely no driver support for Windows 7 for the little Acer (which has an old-school Intel 915GM graphics engine, and various other ancient and non-W7-supported HW bits and pieces ...you're not going to find W7 support for the 3002WTCi no matter how good your mad googling skillz are lol), it was still worth it to me to try a fresh W7 install, just to avoid the lack of support for TRIM in XP ...especially as TRIM support is kind of vital for an SSD, for longevity and performance, making a W7 attempt was "worth a shot".
I also didn't want to deal with alignment issues with XP on an SSD either (there's a thread at oczforum.com - google "How to Align OCZ SSD in XP using USB - SATA and Vista recovery disk" - that explains the procedure pretty thoroughly).
Sooo ...since W7 has TRIM support built-in, I decide a fresh install "just to see" would be worth the little additional effort involved in a new W7 install, even if I eventually decided I'd have to undo it all, and go with XP (I didn't really have any vital and/or personal files to worry about - they'd long since been copied to network storage - so there wasn't even a reason to clone the original drive: I just pulled the old HDD, and set it aside).
Plus, I had the luxury of a spare W7-Home Premium license that I purchased years ago that I've never used: like I said, "...worth a shot."
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OS INSTALL:
The 3002WTCi is an ultra-light (by the old definition); it didn't have an internal optical drive to boot the W7 DVD setup disc from.
So I googled around a bit, and found (and followed) instructions by Steve Tyler at instructables.com - google "Install Windows 7 without USB or DVD without upgrading!" - for doing a self-booting SSD install.
Basically you copy the \boot and \sources folder and the "boot" file from the W7 DVD to the root of your freshly NTFS formatted SSD using a working PC, and use the Windows 7 diskpart utility to make the SSD active ...then, install the SSD to your laptop, and at first boot the process goes right into the familiar Windows 7 setup screen.
I had absolutely no issues whatsoever with the setup portion of W7 on the little Acer. After a couple of the typical W7 setup process restarts, I had a working OS. Cool.
NOTE: My W7 license was an upgrade license ...and the setup wouldn't accept the [entirely legal, as the laptop came with XP Pro] upgrade key because it was a "new fresh install" which was "not supported by the upgrade license". (The help menu suggested re-installing an earlier version of Windows, and then re-installing W7: LOLOL. *That* wasn't going to happen!) So I skipped past the license key entry screen (which turns a new install into a 30-day trial), and went looking for an alternative solution.
To get around that problem [error code 0xC004F061], I found instructions by Kapil Arya at thewindowsclub.com (google "FIX : Error 0xC004F061, Unable To Use Product Key For Clean Install") that detailed changing a DWORD key setting in the Registry (change the value of HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/MediaBootInstall from the default value of "1" to a "0") and then running the command "slmgr /rearm" in an elevated prompt command ...which fixed the issue.
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POST INSTALL DRIVER ISSUES:
After the Windows Setup process was finally complete, I booted into an 800x600 resolution display (heck: at least it was better than 640x480), and was able to change that to 1024x768 using the default W7 VGA driver. The trackpad worked as far as basic functionality. The keyboard worked just fine. The wired network port didn't report any errors (thank you Broadcom). The USB ports worked (good thing, too). Gratifyingly enough, the laptop was more than marginally functional at first boot.
All the more specialized HW bits were down. No internal wireless (this was *not* a huge issue AFAIWC, since I had stopped using the internal wireless years ago, as it simply couldn't connect to any modern-era, n-capable routers ...it was great with the old Linksys WRT54G, but c'mon lol). No sound card (I'm not sure there is sound yet, though the error is gone ...just haven't tested it). UPDATE (06/2014): I got the internal network card to work after all (it was me, not it lol).
But - more serious - the stock W7 VGA driver didn't support the 1280x768 native resolution of the little Acer (a Very Big Deal that would have killed continuing using W7 for me).
To cut to the chase: most driver related issues were fixable, by the simple expedient of installing the original XP drivers, in compatibility mode.
(Find the particular XP era, driver setup executable, and right click, choose Properties, click the Compatibility tab, and check-mark "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" (choose XP) and you're good. At least in the case of the little Acer, XP drivers haven't appeared to cause any deal-killer problems.)
The only caveat to installing XP drivers in compatibility mode is that the older Intel graphics driver - while supporting the resolution just fine - isn't, ever, going to win any speed contests.
Plus, the Intel 915GM chipset simply does *not* support W7 Aero functions at all at the hardware level (which is not the fault of the driver itself); it's old, and that's just the way it is. There's no work-around. Which leads to: I'd suggest (highly!recommend!) that you set the graphics properties to "Classic Windows" and change the Advanced Options to "Performance" ...because with those settings, the display performance is at least perfectly acceptable for mundane Internet related purposes like browsing and emails.
The WEI 1.0 rating of the graphics card is the worst rating (of any piece of hardware) I've ever seen. You're not going to do any gaming beyond solitaire with this, lol. But its performance *is* fine for almost anything else.
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MISC. OBSERVATIONS:
I'd do this again in a minute.
It was well worth the $70 to have a reasonably quick "spare" laptop (whose entire history I am intimately familiar with).
The Acer is much, much quicker in common usage with W7 on the SSD. Much. Quicker.
(This observation seems to contrast with other reviewers who stayed with XP installs, and reported lesser gains. While the little Acer is [still] not a speed demon due to the use of an SSD, it is transparently and obviously faster ...which was also the case when we updated my wife's older Lenovo X-series laptop. So if you have a Windows 7 license, you might want to try upgrading even older, non-supported hardware - using XP compatibility mode for drivers - before you stay with XP. Just sayin' - and YMMV - but W7 worked for me.)
...I will follow-up in a few months if I have any additional observations. If the SSD has any issues at all, I'll also do a follow-up.
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UPDATE (06/2014):
As stated above, the internal network card is, actually, working. (Basically, I should have been paying closer attention during the post-install setup lol.)
...and I've found the little laptop useful enough to have installed an old Office 2010 license to it (which install demonstrated that some hardware performance issues aren't mitigated by the faster SSD: the 2010 install took a couple of *hours* lol ...I've upgraded to Office 2013 subscription for the rest of my workstations, and as the little Acer has proven to be - again - useful, I decided it needed a proper email app' ...and I've long since been an Office Outlook "fanboy" lol).
...still no real issues. It's not a multi-tasking warrior (the Acer's 2GB of RAM is adequate for single-tasking), but it's proven pretty do-able for keeping a few IE tabs open. (I open Outlook "as needed", and close it afterwards.)
| Hard Drive | 64 GB Solid State Drive |
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