# Worth it to put Intel X25-V SSD in my parents PC?



## Ross211 (May 20, 2010)

*Will it be worth it to put an Intel X25-V in my parents PC?

Here are the specs to the PC -
*

_EPOX EP-8KRAIPRO (VIA KT880 chipset & VIA VT8237 southbridge)
(the motherboard does have 2 SATA ports)
Athlon XP-M @ 200x9.0 @ 1.575v
1x512MB DDR400 PC-3200 Corsair VS512MB400 (going to add another stick)
WD Caviar 100GB Parallel ATA100 [almost 9 years old]
Radeon 7500 AGP 32MB
Turbolink 350w PSU (going to replace with Antec Earthwatt 380W)
Windows XP Home SP3_

My parents will never fill a 40GB drive. They use the PC for web browsing, email, and pictures. Their current hard drive is almost 9 years old and I'm surprised it has served this long. XP is taking forever to load even after a fresh install. Their web browser and email client take forever to open up, even with very few processes running in the background. Flash web pages will stutter and freeze up the system (ctr-alt-del won't bring up task manager during the freezes). I've ran Prime95 blend overnight and Memtest all passed with no problems, which puzzles me.

I'm thinking it is the almost 9 year old hard drive working its poor a$$ off about ready to fail. I've already made a backup image of their current HDD. I'm going to put some more RAM in the system, and replace the power supply.

*Will XP work with the X25-V ok? I've heard Intel has some software to provide something like TRIM for Windows XP.*


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## cdawall (May 20, 2010)

its way not worth it get a regular drive


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## newtekie1 (May 20, 2010)

You could, but I don't see why you would.

Dropping in a modern 80GB HDD would probably help out a lot, as would upping the RAM from 512MB to at least 1GB.(I've found XP, even with a fresh install with all the updates, tends to bog down with 512MB or less of RAM.)


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## Fourstaff (May 20, 2010)

+1 to upgrade ram, XP likes 1GB of ram. Just get any cheap Green or F3 drive, it will do just fine.


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## RejZoR (May 20, 2010)

I suggest you do it like this...

Add more RAM, that will make a huge difference. Check the drive with few SMART monitoring tools to see if there are any obvious problems (mostly becaue it's that old). And if none found, defragment it. That should do it.

SSD as much as it may be tempting, i think it's just not worth it in your case.


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## Ross211 (May 20, 2010)

Thanks for the input guys.  I feel ashamed of my parents PC - It should have some better hardware, but for their needs it is sufficient.

They are lucky I'm around to fix it... ;~)


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## Fourstaff (May 20, 2010)

Maybe you should look to rebuild your parent's pc with cheap used hardware. I think you can build something twice as powerful with maybe $200?


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## RejZoR (May 20, 2010)

Why bother if they don't need more really? Dropping in some cheap RAM would make sense but it's just not worth investing into such old system more than that.


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## Ross211 (May 20, 2010)

RejZoR said:


> I suggest you do it like this...
> 
> Add more RAM, that will make a huge difference. Check the drive with few SMART monitoring tools to see if there are any obvious problems (mostly becaue it's that old). And if none found, defragment it. That should do it.
> 
> SSD as much as it may be tempting, i think it's just not worth it in your case.



I did run HD Tune on the drive and it did have a few problems under the SMART tab.  I can't quite remember specifically.

I'm going to remote desktop in later, run it, and find out.

Thanks.


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## RejZoR (May 20, 2010)

Use "CrystalDiskInfo" program. It works the best from my experience.


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## Ross211 (Jun 1, 2010)

Ok, I finally ran HD Tune again on my parents PC and here is what there WDC 100GB looks like under the HD Tune HealthTab -












And I ran Crystal Disk Info - Thank you RejZoR for recommending this program!  I was thinking it was my parents hard drive causing problems.  This WD Caviar 100GB had a lot of hours on it back in the day 

I find it funny that Crystal Disk Info reports Caution and HD Tune reports that the health of the drive is ok.

I already ordered my parents this before these tests - 

WD1600AAJS 

VS512MB400
(so, they'll have 1GB RAM for XP - 2x512MB)


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## RejZoR (Jun 1, 2010)

Well, personally i'd trust CrystalDiskInfo. In my case, system was constantly randomly BSOD-ing. I couldn't find the reason why. All components were showing everything is ok after testing them.
I even checked disk with HDDlife and Active@Disk Monitor. They both showed OK. Then i tried CrystalDiskInfo and i got the CAUTION and also re-allocation sector count warning.
I was thinking of bigger HDD anyway at that time so i just bought 2TB Caviar Black. And guess what, BSOD's were gone. It's almost 2 weeks now and not a single BSOD. Yes, it was HDD that was causing them, yet it appeared to work fine, but it was not. And CrystalDiskInfo warned me about it. It's a great tool. You can test  other components first just to be sure but i think this is it. I trust CDI after what i've seen.


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