0Speed up SSDs, especially in netbooks

I recently upgraded the SSD in an Asus eeePC 901, and whilst the size and per­form­ance were both bet­ter, the per­form­ance upgrade still was­n’t on par with even a 5+ year old laptop HDD. The prob­lem with most SSDs, espe­cially the cheap­er ones, is that they usu­ally have very poor write per­form­ance with small files. This can make win­dows very slug­gish and unre­spons­ive at times.

In my search for a way to ale­vi­ate this issue I dis­covered a driver called Flash­Point, spe­cific­ally for SSDs run­ning Win­dows XP — which claimed to improve per­form­ance by cre­at­ing a much lar­ger write-cache. Des­pite my ini­tial skep­ti­cism I decided to have a crack any­way, and was pleas­antly sur­prised that respons­ive­ness improved very sub­stan­tially. Sadly the web­site asso­ci­ated with the util­ity seems to have dis­ap­peared into obli­vi­on, so I have no fur­ther inform­a­tion or doc­u­ment­a­tion. For any­one who wishes to give it a try, here is a link to my copy. After down­load­ing, extract the zip, right click on the inf file, and select “install”. Use at your own risk!

Note: as far as I am aware this driver was avail­able free. If it has been absorbed by a com­mer­cial entity, or is copy­right or restric­ted in any way please get in touch and I will update this post accordingly

Update.…

Can I dir­ect read­ers to Flash­Fire which seems to be home to a sim­il­ar / updated pro­gram which does the same job.

For those who wish to exper­i­ment the ori­gin­al ver­sion that I had is avail­able on the [int­link id=“741” type=“page”]downloads page[/intlink]