Windows 7 & Solid State Disks (SSDs)

The past 18 months have seen Solid State Disk (SSD) drives go from being a strange and expensive curiosity to a very effective way to get a performance boost from your laptop.  While these tweaks can be applied to desktop PCs too, my focus will be on laptops.  Here's the big benefits of SSDs:

1. No moving parts- the hard drive is a sensitive part of your PC and quite susceptible to shock when you smack it on a table or jostle it in a bag when it's still on.
2. Maintenance intensive.  Most folks don't realize that a full day's use or heavy file operations fragment your hard drive by scattering files all over.  As a result, you end up with a computer that gradually gets slower and slower.  Plus Window's defrag tools really stink- I like Auslogic's tool for my disk drives.
3. Performance!  I know it's listed third, but there's a good reason in this alone to upgrade.  Traditional hard disks usually range from 80-120 megabytes per second.  A good Intel SSD can easily get 450 megabytes read & 200+ megabytes per second on writes.  Watch out, there are cheap crappy SSDs out there that perform worse than hard disks.

The good news is that Windows 7 can take advantage of of SSDs, but not all disks trigger the automatic support in Windows 7.  When that happens, it's important to make the few changes to the system.  It may seem fine without them, but the changes will make the laptop even faster & keep the disk healthy over time.  

One big issue is that Windows wants to defrag your hard drive- clean it up and put all the files together at the beginning of the disk. This is good for older drives but bad for SSDs.  SSDs actually run faster when the files are spread all over, so you don't want them lined up together.  There are other more technical reasons around the wear of the SSD, but that's for another day.

There are a couple easy things to do if you're not too technical.  This this is for you:

1. Turn off the task to defrag your hard drive.  
   1. Go to Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Task Scheduler
   2. On the left hand side of the screen, expand Task Scheduler Library->Microsoft->Windows->Defrag
   3. In the top center window, right-click the task and select 'Disable'
   4. Close the windows you used to get there.
2. Complicated, huh?  You can also just go to this site and download the tool.  I've used this for nearly a year with no troubles.
3. Go to the manufacturer of your SSD and download & install ALL of their drivers/tools, even if you don't plan to use them.  These help add some things in the background.

If you feel pretty technical, here are a couple more notes for you:

• You can disable your pagefile/swap file if you have 8GB or more.  You can also just manually set it to 1024MB (both min & max) to keep the rarely-used swap file from eating up expensive SSD space.
• RAID of SSDs is mind-blowingly fast, but expensive.  You can do disk striping to get breakneck speeds, but you end up losing support for TRIM and other key functions.
• Consider moving your MP3s, movies and other large files to a second disk.  I replaced my optical drive in one laptop with a traditional hard disk.  I park my media files, software installers and other large bits there.
• Don't partition the whole disk- with Windows 7 and Bitlocker, there's a performance drop when the whole disk is encrypted.  So I manually partition the disk and leave about 500MB free on the main partition.

New Yorker for iPad (other digital magazines too)

The New Yorker

Conde Nast, the publisher of several major magazine properties has released a new app for the iPad.  I'll get to the look and feel of the app in a moment, but it's worth noting a major update for the publisher- they announced support for in-app subscription support as well as future support for print subscribers.  This is great news if you already paid for a subscription, and provides an easy way to try out the magazines Conde Nast offers without buying a second subscription.

New Yorker sample pageTo start, the app is gorgeous.  The transitions are terrific, and they have really kept the classy look of the magazine.  I had a Kindle subscription to the New Yorker for about a year and loved the writing- but with the Kindle you get only text and the occasional grey image.  The New Yorker on the iPad is color and makes great use of the iPad.

New Yorker article introIn the first issue, they also show great variety in the layout and design.  They obviously have a great setup for typesetting and page layouts- I didn't see one layout repeated, but they still managed to avoid the sometimes-bewildering layouts that Wired Magazine sometimes delivers.

Other Magazines

It's also worth mentioning that Martha Stewart's iPad magazine app is pretty clever too.  They are a little more adventurous with the layouts, but they still deliver a great experience.

 The Martha Stewart app does a great job of encouraging you to "play" in the app, moving around magazine elements as if they were on train tracks.  You can't really mess it up or cover up what you're reading, but you can move the elements that seems to make it more fun.

Trying out these magazine apps made me wish for more just like them.  Both apps do everything just right, although I am not really a big Martha Stewart reader.  Wired magazine & GQ magazine are probably my only two cover-to-cover paper subscriptions where I read everything.  I have bought a couple of the iPad app versions, but considering my paper subscription to both runs into 2012 or 2013 it's pretty wasteful to drop $5 on each month's release.  GQ takes a pretty conservative approach, while Wired seems to want to make everything a video.  I know I am tired of a video playing for the cover of the May Wired issue every time I open the issue.  What Wired does to look cool and wild in paper translates into annoying videos and page behavior in the app.  The good news is that once those things are out of the way, the layout is great there too:

These are all essentially consumer magazines, and looking nifty is the name of the game for them.  I am really missing Harvard Business Review in digital form- the Kindle version can't be viewed or downloaded to my iPad, so I read it far less often and don't get the same treatment as these magazines give me.  Given the recent flood of magazines, I expect to see HBR as an iPad app in six months tops.

To me, the last but not least of the new publications is the Bloomberg Business app.  These guys have it right- a weekly publication that is free to current subscribers- a first in the app store if I'm not mistaken.  They handle video, inteviews with the publishing staff to give some backstory to the week's articles.  It's easily an equal on all parts to the print version, and better since it arrives in my mailbox at home after I leave for travel and the iPad version is ready most Monday nights.

Navigation is also easy and intuitive.  I am interested to see if a new standard for layout and behavior will emerge.  I'm hoping those annoying carboard inserts don't find their way into the apps though.  

In summary, there's already a good showing of magazine apps.  I sold my first generation iPad after waiting six months for these magazines to emerge.  A little more than a year later, we've got some serious progress being made.