New SSD

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steamboateng

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For those who are interested in upgrading their drives, you can get a good deal at Best Buy, now. The Intell 320 series, 120 GB SSD's are on sale for $169.99!
(USD)! That's just $10 more than any thing I found on the internet, and if there's one close by, no shipping/handling charges.
These boxed versions are complete with cabeling, 2.5" to 3.5" bay adaptor, mounting screws and even a cute little screw driver.
Tomorrow I will install this puppy, and migrate TS2010 burgening folders over to it.
Luckily I don't have to go thru the hassle of reinstalling the OS, as that is already installed on a smaller, 80GB SSD.
Any hints on how to successfully xfer TS2010 over to the new drive?
 
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SSD update:
Physically installing the Intell 320 Series SSD was relatively simple. It comes with all parts to install in a desktop or laptop computer.
Getting Mr Win7-64 to recognize the drive took bit longer. (I'm no computer guru, just a curious tinkerer!)
The drive showed up in the Device Manager but not in My Computer. It needed to be initialized.
From the Control Panel I had to navigate to the Disk Manager. The new drive is initialized from here. Once initialized it needs to be formatted. It is formatted from here also. Once formatted it shows up in My Computer and can be written to.
TS2010 lives on my C Drive, along with the Win OS. My C Drive is a rather small 80GB Intell SSD. I wanted to move the program over to the newly installed and formatted 120 GB SSD drive.
Well, that's the scary part because I don't want to lose dowloaded and installed content as well as program fixes.
A trainzer on the forums mentioned he did a fresh reinstall of Trainz to the new drive and transfered the content of the older install into the new install via Windows explorer.
That works!
TS2010 is now the sole resident on its own 120GB SSD drive.
I checked the new installation in both Surveyor and Content Manager. All is well.
And that, fellow Trainzers, is my tale of mysterious SSD solutions for Dummies!
 
What I've done is just copy the entire \TS2010 folder to another drive, or a different folder on the same drive, or another computer over a LAN, then create a new shortcut to that trainz.exe. Since I use content manager to import CDP files or download stuff the default path for CDP installation isn't really an issue for me.

What I'm curious about is stuttering and jerking, does an SSD smooth out the framerates?
 
I believe an SSD is an ideal media from which to run Trainz. SSD access and write times blow out standard HHD's.
I can't say I've pushed Trainz to the limit, but I have experimented with running TS2010 trains thruogh concentrated groups of content, like large towns, without experiencing stuttering. And I do have the sliders set high. Of course it helps to have a good processor, an oc'd i7 in my case, to take advantage of the ssd speeds. I believe that coupling an i5 or i7 to an ssd will give a mid-range system a significant performance boost over anything that was available 2 years ago. Of course there are other factors, processor clock speed, memory size, type and speed, gpu, and even the OS. (by the way, Win 7 is optimized for ssd's).
All in all, my opinion is ssd is the way to go with Trainz. You will notice the difference.
 
Steamboateng said "A trainzer on the forums mentioned he did a fresh reinstall of Trainz to the new drive and transfered the content of the older install into the new install via Windows explorer. That works!"
That might have been me. I've found through bitter experience that trying to transfer Trainz wholesale from one drive to another simply doesn't work, and the bonus of an SSD is that everything installs on it in lightning time!
Incidentally did you update the Firmware before you installed? I got an OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB and apparently if you don't update before installing it can cause problems later on.
I've been casting covetous eyes on OCZ Revodrives which are falling in price now to the extent they are affordable - I don't "need" one but my experience in building my own PC has turned me into a technology junkie!
 
Might be the difference between Win7 and XP, but it's never been a problem for me. My son's computer has never had any version of Trainz installed on it, he still has XP service pack 2, so I patch on my SP3 system then just copy the TS2010 or TS2009 folder to his system and create a shortcut on his desktop. As far as his system registry and installshield wizard knows he's never had any version of Trainz, yet he's running one now.
 
sniper297 said:
Might be the difference between Win7 and XP, but it's never been a problem for me. My son's computer has never had any version of Trainz installed on it, he still has XP service pack 2, so I patch on my SP3 system then just copy the TS2010 or TS2009 folder to his system and create a shortcut on his desktop. As far as his system registry and installshield wizard knows he's never had any version of Trainz, yet he's running one now.
Click to expand...

Maybe that's the difference? If his PC has never had Trainz on it has less opportunity to get "confused" I'm talking about transferring Train on the SAME PC albeit with a new drive. In the case of an SSD which is of course radically different to a HDD, that might be enough to cause problems

BTW one of the differences with an SSD is that loading times for a route are slashed - minutes become seconds, and in my case FPS were noticeably improved even with the same GPU. Also Windows Experience Index went from 4.9 to 7.7 :cool:
 
lewisner, that was an excellent suggestion and went well. Believe me, I was holding my breath when I restarted Trainz from the new drive.
Ola! It works!:)

Intell has an SDD Toolbox utility which can be downloaded from its site. The utility will upgrade firmware, check all write addresses, and optimize the ssd performance. I did all that prior to loading anything on the disk.
I used the toolbox to check and optimize my older Intell ssd, as well as upgraded its firmware. I believe the utility is specific to Intell ssd's

Sniper, I was thinking about going the route you suggest for xfering TS2010 onto the new drive. However, I felt that starting from a fresh install might not be a bad idea, even if many files get overwritten.
 
steamboateng said:
...................From the Control Panel I had to navigate to the Disk Manager. The new drive is initialized from here. Once initialized it needs to be formatted. It is formatted from here also. Once formatted it shows up in My Computer and can be written to.
.............................And that, fellow Trainzers, is my tale of mysterious SSD solutions for Dummies!
Click to expand...

Yes, I've had PCs since the eighties, and I never knew of the existence of Disk Manager until I had to use it to get my SSD to show up! They certainly work well for Trainz, loading times vastly improved.
Mick Berg.
 
Steamboateng, one of the bizarre things i found when i installed my SSD was that Speedfan showed its temperature as 128 degrees C whereas it cold to the touch. Apparently this sometimes happens. Also re the mention of Disk Manager it is worth mentioning that SSD's don't need defragmenti.g.
 
I probably shouldn't admit it, but I hate working with drives.
Whenever we had a drive failure on a home computer I'd call my wife (Hereafter known as THE Chief Mate......) to fix it and she is soooooo....much more patient than I. Besides, I was a trveling man ( doin' the best I can.....etc....etc....) So she would reinstall OS , i would reinstall drive. This all worked well until I retired...........
I had to face the challenge.........
Well, if your old enough, you can figure it out.............!
 
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