Just Release: Xara Designer Pro X11

**Ron Duke** · 17 August 2015, 04:29 PM

Originally Posted by ad1066

I went and reinstalled Windows on my main PC because I just upgraded to SSD. I didn't remember to deactivate XDP before pulling the drive, so I'm running the trial version on both machines now (desktop and tablet). The good news is that I should be able to deactivate both previous installs from the website on the 20th (being 30 days out from when I originally installed XDP11 on both) and then reactivate, and in the meantime the trial is running just fine.

On the plus side, XDP on Windows 10 on an SSD runs *really* fast. Very happy with it.

-- Ben

What's an SSD?

**Egg Bramhill** · 17 August 2015, 04:30 PM

A Solid State Drive Ron

**Ron Duke** · 17 August 2015, 05:58 PM

Thanks Eric. Isn't that standard on new computers now?

**Egg Bramhill** · 17 August 2015, 08:19 PM

Moving that way I'd say Ron. Still more expensive than standard hard drives but great for using as your C drive. Loads much faster. I have a 240 Gb SSD as my C drive, with the OS & program files & a 120Gb SSD for my important files and a 500Gb standard drive for less important files and photo's etc. Very pleased with this set up. And very silent

**Ron Duke** · 17 August 2015, 08:21 PM

Originally Posted by Egg Bramhill

Moving that way I'd say Ron. Still more expensive than standard hard drives but great for using as your C drive. Loads much faster. I have a 240 Gb SSD as my C drive & a 120Gb SSD for my important files and a 500Gb standard drive for photo's etc. Very pleased with this set up.

Thank you Eric. Good to know.

**Ron Duke** · 17 August 2015, 08:25 PM

Did you build it yourself or did you have it built?

**Egg Bramhill** · 17 August 2015, 08:35 PM

Hi Ron, I bought it as a recon workstation. It only had a 500Gb drive which to be honest was very noisy, so I purchased & fitted a 120 Gb SSD and transferred my OS & program files to it. I soon found I was rapidly running out of space on this 120Gb SSD so bought a 240Gb one and used this as my C drive. Fitting wasn't a problem, the hardest part was reducing the content of the 500Gb drive to below 120Gb to mirror it to the SSD. Not to painful though and well worth the speed increase. The BIOS dosen't load faster, but once past that the OS loads far faster

**browj2** · 17 August 2015, 11:28 PM

@Egg,

I did almost the same as you, but 256 was not enough so I changed to 512. I use the 256 SSD for rendering/exporting videos. My Documents are now on drive B, just to be different and because Windows was proposing something like W for my other new internal drive. Any idea why the BIOS load takes so long? I have the same problem which wasn't there before, or at least I don't think it was.

@Ron,

We published some tests results about different SSD drives on the Magix Community site a while back, along with a link to a program for testing the speed. I'll hunt it down if you're interested. Loading the OS and programs is much quicker than with a normal drive. As far as I know, it is not a good idea to use an SSD for high read/write operations as it may wear out faster. Someone else here may have better info.

**Egg Bramhill** · 18 August 2015, 02:52 AM

Any idea why the BIOS load takes so long?

The following might be complete B/S but here's my understanding:

The BIOS is loaded from ROM on the motherboard
This then tells the system where to boot the OS and program files, video cards, sound cards etc, etc from
It's only at this point that the speed of the SSD creates an increase in start-up procedure

Unfortunately the guy that really could answer this question, Steve Ledger, appears to have sadly departed this forum.

As far as I know, it is not a good idea to use an SSD for high read/write operations as it may wear out faster

To the best of my knowledge there is some truth in this but I can't find a definitive answer on this. One of the main problems I have in this area is "page files". I don't even pretend to understand these. However I've somehow set my PC to write these page files to my standard HD, just to avoid high read/write operations to my SSD as mentioned.

Now occasionally I find that my HD is chugging away, doing these "page files" and as I mentioned earlier my 500Gb disc is Very noisy. I've no solution for this

**mikeymopar** · 18 August 2015, 03:34 AM

i hate perpetuating the ot in this thread but...

if BIOS is seemingly to load slower, were other drives added to check for boot from prior to booting from the primary drive?
and after BIOS, added software can add to startup times becoming increasingly longer. with software that you rarely use, or don't mind a few seconds longer to start when you do actually use it, could be disabled from the startup menu configured in older win versions thru msconfig or newer versions in task manager

and todays reputable ssd's will last longer than hard drives. using it not only to boot from and store files to, it can really help speed things up if you don't have enough ram and configure a portion of it to be used as ram