So, over the past few months, I've occasionally noticed my tablet PC has been taking a while to boot up. Its not that it occurred occasionally, but rather than most times, I don't sit there waiting for it to boot unless I don't get to class early enough to boot up before lecture starts. This is rare so it really wasn't something I noticed too badly. But at some point I did notice and it began to bother me everytime I noticed it. So I ended up looking into SSD's and found a nice deal on one. Got it yesterday, made a restore disc on my USB drive and reinstalled everything. Seemed to run much much faster as Windows updated very quickly each time I rebooted to complete an update. Then I finally shut completely down to see how long it actually took.

The HP logo remained on screen for nearly a damned minute anytime I cold started. Restarts were still quite fast. Initially, I thought it was the bios performing tests and started seeking ways to modify the bios as the HP bios is extremely limited in terms of user controls. Looked to be way over my head and while searching for a bios that someone else already hacked up that provided the functionality I needed, I ran across a thread in a forum that put the blame on a micro sd card adapter. I had actually put one of the many I have laying around into my laptop months ago. I pulled it out and did a cold boot. Sure enough, the damned thing blinked the HP logo for about a second and went straight to loading windows. Apparently, it was trying to read a drive that wasn't there and moved on only after it timed out.

Talk about a stupid reason for it to take so long to boot. I might understand if I had it set to prioritize the slot as a boot drive, but the HDD has the priority in BIOS.

The good news is I ended up with a much faster performing SSD. I got a 128GB Kinsgton V+ series drive. I almost ended up with a 160GB OCZ Agility 2 but someone outbid me by 0.01 cent within 30 seconds of the auction ending on ebay. Regardless, Windows boots more quickly. And programs load much quicker as well. I probably wouldn't have bought it had I found the micro sd adapter problem before getting it, since I had a fairly fast 7200 RPM drive, but I'm not disappointed. Overall boot time alone wouldn't justify the cost, but it does open programs much quicker. Only thing I lose is almost 300 GB of storage. Not that I needed or even really used that much. I had it filled, with movies, but only because I had the space. I never used it to watch movies. Good news is I have freed up a 7200 RPM drive for one of my other laptops.

Have you looked to see if the HDD is set to boot first? If so it may help with the SD issue.

asnorton44 wrote:Have you looked to see if the HDD is set to boot first? If so it may help with the SD issue.

Actually yes, as I stated in the OP:

C-Kwik wrote: I might understand if I had it set to prioritize the slot as a boot drive, but the HDD has the priority in BIOS.

How big is that card reader? Possibly large enough that after you remove it you could mount the other drive in there as well?

No, it was a micro to SD card adapter that I had in there. And the card reader is built-in. I'll likely leave the old drive untouched until after this quarter so I can make sure I get anything off that I didn't migrate over. I have a DV9000t that has an extra drive bay, but I'll think about it a while as we still have plenty of space on it and the battery on that is not exactly all that great as it is (early C2D, coupled with a 17" CFL back-lit monitor = 2 hours of battery life, even with the extended battery). Then again, I rarely use it in a place I can't plug in. We bought it as a portable solution for running Maya when the GF was in school and I've used it for an AutoCad group project where we met at Starbucks to do. I'll be taking a solidworks course over the summer so it may come in handy again. The large screen real estate is really helpful. Of course, I'd prefer my 25 and 24 inch dual head at home coupled to a Core-i7-960 with 12 GB RAM.

C-Kwik wrote:for an AutoCad group project

Of course, I'd prefer my 25 and 24 inch dual head at home coupled to a Core-i7-960 with 12 GB RAM.

How difficult is it to learn autocad programs? Could I just DL an autocad program and mess with it or is school required?

Its a pretty robust program so it may be pretty tough to learn thoroughly. But it is pretty easy to learn with a book. My textbook was "Beginning AutoCAD" by Schrock. My professor pretty much had us do the lessons to learn the program and only lectured on drafting standards. However, we never got into 3D AutoCAD so I'm not sure how uch harder it is to learn it. I opened up a 3D space once and tried to figure it out, but it wasn't all that intuitive (at least for me) using techniques I learned for 2D. I suspect it might be almost as easy to learn with a good textbook though.