If you’ve been following my quest to get the Fujitsu P1610 running Vista as fast and efficient as it ran XP you know that I’ve done a few things to make that happen. First up was killing the dreaded Vista disk thrashing, followed by getting the battery life back to XP levels. I am happy to report that my day yesterday showed a total success on all fronts, with battery life back to pre-Vista levels and snappy performance all around.
Kevin’s success at upgrading the memory in his Samsung Q1P to 2 GB sent me off on a quest to find a 2 GB microDIMM for the Fuji, but that has not been successful. I can’t find anyone that sells a 2 GB microDIMM but I will keep an eye out for one. One upgrade that I think will add to my performance improvements is a hard drive upgrade, and I have a new drive on the way. The P1610 currently has an 80 GB 1.8" ATA drive running at 4200 rpm, a very slow drive. It’s almost full so I went to my favorite online notebook drive shop, Drive Solutions, and ordered a 120 GB drive running at 5400 rpm. Drive Solutions had a 100 GB drive that spins at 7200 rpm but I optedfor the larger capacity and a speed kinder on battery life. I am excited at the prospect of having 50% more drive capacity and a faster drive. I will detail the upgrade process when I get the drive but for now here’s what I’ve done to get ready for the drive swap.
I went online and downloaded the latest version of Acronis True Image which works with Vista. After installing the software I used it to create a boot DVD that I can use to boot the Fuji and rebuild the new drive. After creating that I used it to clone my Fujitsu drive to an external Seagate USB drive which took about 2 hours. Once I swap the new drive into the Fujitsu I will reverse the process and clone the USB drive to the internal Fuji drive and I should be right back where I started, but with a faster, bigger hard drive. Woot!
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2007\/05\/17\/my_fujitsu_p161\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_279104d159efb0c6a9146f082d93149f","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}