Upgrade help

[AOD_Vial8R]

Ok, so I have the CPU, motherboard and the 8GB RAM that was on Newegg's shellshocker deal recently. I ran a backup of my SSD that has the OS installed, along with the partition on one of my regular drives that I have all my other programs installed on. I haven't upgraded a CPU/motherboard combo in 10-15 years and that required a complete reinstall. I have looked around and seen that some people recommend running sysprep then changing everything, starting and letting it do it's thing. However, other people say that with Windows 7 you do not need to really worry about that, as it will automatically figure everything out itself once you turn it on. I know how to sysprep, since I did go to school for network communication specialist, but if I don't need to, I would rather not since it takes extra time and I would lose personalization. Not to mention, if it doesn't work, the pain to try to redo everything. So, any recommendations from the AOD community?

[Mokona512]

When changing a lot of hardware, it is best to reinstall, even if it does boot without a fresh install, often, you will have weird issues that may not be immediately noticeable, e.g., on a friends system, he swapped the motherboard, CPU, and hard drive, and windows 7 still boosts, and after uninstalling the old drivers and installing new ones, everything seemed fine until he noticed that he could not access the advanced settings for the Ethernet adapter and a bunch of other weird issues that are not immediately noticeable.

For windows 7, you can backup your customizations by backing up the users folder.

If you want to restore customizations from an old windows 7 install, then be sure to backup the users folder, in addition to the ProgramData folder, and both program files folders

Then after you do the fresh install, you can selectively restore the program files entries for the specific applications that you have customized, you then head to the users folders and restore their app data folders also, and if you use windows media player, then after fully updating windows 7, restore all of the windows media player related folders in the app data folders.

If done properly, once you reinstall your applications, they will look and exactly like how you left them on the old windows install. (this works for between windows 7 installs, as well as moving back and forth between windows 7 and windows vista)

If you customized the windows 7 UI, using the built in windows settings, then those can also be restored, though you will have to boot into a linux life USB or CD in order to restore those config files.

If you are up for doing this, then the only real time consuming part is updating windows 7 (which is pretty much automated), instaling drivers (which you have to do anyway), and everything else will take you about 10 minutes to do if you are restoring the system like how I described.

[AOD_Vial8R]

The backup I ran included the SSD that Windows 7 is on, with only a handful of third party programs, mainly utilities and Battlefield 4. I also backed up my User partition and my installed programs partition from two of my regular drives, just to keep everything "together" in case I needed to do a sysprep or complete reinstall. I have over 80 programs installed on my other drive and I really do not want to have to reinstall all of those. I am not too worried about reinstalling Windows itself, as that entire drive is just the OS and maybe 5-10 other small utility programs that would only take a few minutes to reinstall and configure. If I have reinstall Windows, all my programs on my other drive would break due to registry changes though, wouldn't they? Which would require them to be reinstalled?

[Mokona512]

They most likely will break and need to be reinstalled, especially if they use any form of DRM. if you do not want to go through with that, then you can keep the same install, just be sure to inspect every settings menu you can think of to make sure everything is working fine. (test as many OS features as possible that will not cause issues with the current install).

[AOD_Vial8R]

Went ahead and bit the bullet. Turned off the computer, swapped out everything with the new parts and turned it on. I left the current OS install on my SSD and hoped for the best that it would figure everything out on it's own. It took a few to startup, of course, but everything is up and running now. Only thing that changed is the Windows ratings. It was 6.6, 6.6, 7.3, 7.3, 7.3. It is now 7.1, 7.7, 7.3, 7.3, 6.8. Hard drive went down from 7.3 to 6.8, even though it went from a SATA 2 port to a SATA 3 port, and it shows it is faster in the settings for it. I did update all the drivers for the motherboard, but it didn't change. It doesn't really matter, the most important thing is that it shows it is running faster and everything is working, it's just odd.

[Mokona512]

The windows ratings are extremely inaccurate, and will often fail to test the right hardware, for example, I have an SSD which can get a score of 7.9, in addition to a few slower hard drives, though if they are connected, the storage score drops to 5.9. The scale is also not linear, for example doubling the throughput and IOPS of the storage may increase the storage score by .5 points on the ~7 range, but if your scores are in the lower ~3 range, e.g., moving from a earlier 5400RPM 60GB drive, to a 7200RPM drive which will add around 40-50% additional throughput and IOPS, may take the score to close to the ~5 range. Overall, the scores are simply not linear, and the closer you get to the limit, like an RPG game, it takes so much more to increase the level.

And for some drives, it is unable to get anything remotely close to a realistic score, for example some of the earlier enterprise SSD's would not have much throughput,but would have significantly higher than average IOPS to a point where they effectively maintained around 10-20 times the throughput for IO intensive work, yet they would score lower than the top of the line HDD's of the time.

Just be sure to look through the settings for as many items as you can, and if you get the chance, run cinebench http://www.maxon.net/products/cinebench/overview.html (direct download link: http://http.maxon.net/pub/benchmarks/CINEBENCH_R15.zip )

and also 3d mark Easiest way to get the latest version of 3d mark is through steam if you have it installed http://store.steampowered.com/app/223850/
http://www.futuremark.com/support/downloads

run all of the tests to make sure you are performing at a level comparable to similar systems (and matched for your CPU)

[AOD_Vial8R]

I know the ratings are there more for show really, I just thought it was odd that the ssd would drop when it went from a sata 2 to sata 3 port and the Samsung program shows it operating more than 4 times faster on both read/writes. The only thing that changed was the motherboard, processor, RAM, and I removed one of my regular hard drives that was used for storage. The Windows install didn't change. Again, just odd. I did have a few random crashes relating to dx11 after playing battlefield for a while, but I did a clean install of the graphics card drivers and hopefully that fixes it. Dxdiag didn't show any problems, so hoping it was just the card.

From my Moto X to your screen via the magic of the internet.

[AOD_Vial8R]

Couple of DX crashes tonight, here is the error: DirectX function "GetDeviceRemovedReason" failed with dxgi_error_device_hung ("The devide is hung which is typically caused by issues in the graphics driver or alternatively the application""). GPU: "NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450", Driver: 34052. Anyone have any ideas? There are a lot of different "fixes" online, not sure where to start, besides what I did in the post above.

[AOD_Vial8R]

Current System Setup:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/84XRnQ

[Mokona512]

it could be due to the way it tests the performance, It tries to test for a fixed time rather than a specific transfer size. The 840 evo uses a portion of the flash memory to store only 1 bit per cell, that allows the drive to do short reads and writes very quickly while the drive will internally dump the SLC cache into the TLC NAND. With the 840 evo, when that cache is being used, the throughput is very good (much faster than the NAND running in TLC mode) Only issue is that the cache is small, and if the benchmark completely fills the cache, then the drive will get bottlenecked by the TLC flash and run significantly slower than what even the SATA 2.0 bus can handle.

the drive has 3GB of SLC cache, so if the benchmark uses more than 3GB of writes during a fixed time test, then it will essentially write 3GB quickly, and this have a massive drop in write performance for the rest of the benchmark, which will impact the benchmark results.

here are the benchmarks from anandtech



http://www.anandtech.com/show/7173/s...odels-tested/4

for the 120GB version, after around 7 seconds of writing, the write speeds drop lower than that of a good 7200RPM hard drive

If the drive is more than 1/3rd full then the write speeds will be even lower as with TLC nand, the first 3rd of the drive essentially writes 1 bit to each of the triple level cells, after that,it then moves onto adding additional bits, but due to how flash memory works, in order to change the data on it to represent more bits, the originaldata must first be read, the cell is then erased, and then the new value is written that represents the additional bits. this essentially triples the number of IO's needed to write the data.

MLC flash gets the slow down at around 50% full, though with higher end SSD's such as the 850 pro, the IO performance of the drive exceeds the sata bus ans thus even if the speed drops by 40-50%, the NAND will still be able to offer enough performance to saturate the SATA 3 bus.