2013 — 24 June: Monday
Yep, definitely midsummer. How else can one interpret today's top forecast temperature of 16C? (It's currently 20.7C in the living room.)
Meanwhile, ahead of the arrival from Germany of the 480GB SSD that will become my new Win8 system disk, I can continue with my "new broom" policy on the old one — the supposedly speedy1 — 150GB Velociraptor. My, how the crud accumulates. By the time I clone it ready for the transfer I'd like it restored to some semblance of its original leanness and meanness. I've always preferred to keep application data physically away from the OS space, though not too many applications are fully co-operative in that respect.
This was merely the first of the series of nasty culture shocks I experienced when reluctantly migrating (after 13 years of effortless [dare one say "Mac-like"?] 'productivity') from Acorn's RISC-OS on my beloved 203MHz (!) StrongARM RISC PC system over to my first-ever Windows PC (running XP Pro on a 2.5GHz Pentium of some flavour) at home in late 2002. Despite the enormous difference in processor speed, the most delightful aspect of the Intel was its ability to emulate my familiar RISC-OS environment...
... at about 150% of the performance of the original while I migrated2 as much of my data as was feasible.
Breakfast concluded, it's...
... time to relocate the bits of my broken office chair to a more suitable home: the local tip. [Pause] And back again, having greeted there by name an ex-colleague who was in a new car clearly worth rather more than my entire widower's mite. He'd obviously managed to forget (repress?) who I am, since he also forgot to give me his customary once-a-year Masonic secret handshake to find out if I'd yet joined his "secret" gang.
I still smile to recall the deep red flush on the cheeks of one of my (22) first-line managers when a mischievous chum asked him, in a group meeting, if it was true that to expedite your progress up the greasy IBM managerial pole, it was first necessary to join the Freemasons :-)
Is it just me...
... or do other people also find the shopping goes more smoothly when I remember to take my wallet with me? Still, at least this time I was barely 200 yards from the house before it occurred to me to check. Progress, of a sort. (Last time, I was sitting in the Waitrose car park.)
Meanwhile, having put firmly behind me the momentary temptation of an in-stock 240GB SSD, upgraded my trial version of Acronis True Image 2013 to the real thing, greeted my neighbours' new, black, miniature Schnauser (yclept "Ebony"), and dispersed the leekless shopping around the kitchen in all the usual hiding places, I think I've just about earned my next cuppa. Tea: Prepare to be drunk.
The living room has soared to a more acceptable 21.8C as noon trundles rapidly toward me. [Pause] Late-breaking early afternoon news: the 480GB SSD has just turned up, much earlier than originally notified, and by means of Parcel Force, all the way from Düren. And it's physically tiny. Excellent. But it will have to sit around until my sausages have, as it were, gone down the hatch.
That was pleasantly...
... glitch-free. Under Len's watchful eye — he having undertaken a near-identical system disk replacement journey a week or so ago — I:
- first made a fresh backup of the C: drive currently on the Velociraptor (courtesy of my shiny new full-version True Image) while munching my lunch, then
- I temporarily unconnected drive E:, connecting the new SSD using drive E:'s power and data leads, rebooted,
- used True Image to restore today's backup of the WinRE and System partitions directly on to the unformatted, unpartitioned SSD,
- intercepted the next reboot to modify the BIOS hard drive boot order so it would now look first at the SSD,
- allowed the reboot to complete and then confirmed (by a quick look at Disk Management) that the Win8 system was indeed now loading from the active boot partition on the SSD,
- powered down, disconnected the Velociraptor (but cunningly left it physically in situ lest I need it in the future),
- tucked the SSD casually on top of it (after first confirming its SATA lead was plumbed into one of the [faster] SATA III ports),
- closed up the case, switched BlackBeast back on, and watched a considerably faster boot process.
I estimate the time to reach the "Start" screen from the display of the initial "Win8" symbol is now about seven seconds, which is (I admit) not really long enough to make my morning cuppa. I suspect Step 3 was the cleverest bit, and took the longest (about 15 minutes) as True Image did all the necessary partitioning and boundary aligning of the initially empty SSD on the fly. There then remained just a few final minor adjustments. For example, first repeating the "Windows Experience" index generation to ensure...
... that Win8 knows it now has an SSD to deal with, so it doesn't make the mistake of ever trying to defrag it. Then making a fruitless attempt to knock the 250MB "swapfile.sys" that had mysteriously appeared (as a cunningly hidden system file in the root of the new C: drive) on the head. This file seems to be something associated with all the tablet-oriented "Modern Apps" that I don't use, but I note it gets written afresh to the system drive once per reboot, and I don't like that happening. Anyway, that's essentially all there was to it.
I note that...
... my primary hard drive has gone from being the slowest component (at 5.9) to the fastest (at 8.1) out of the 9.9 current maximum.