The defrag utility built into Vista is supposed to be smart enough to calculate the benefits of defragging, and if they don't outweigh the cost of the process, skip doing the defrag. You'd hope that the defragger would be smart enough to detect when there's no seek time or rotational latency, and always skip defragging.

This thread brings to mind the Network Computer and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPD). We keep looking for a very thin PC that store information on the network or on solid state media. If you think about it, I bet 95% of the computers in use for work or study at MSU have fewer than 8G of working day. Lew Greenberg used to point out that people type at 110 baud -- you just don't generate large amounts of data yourself. People may generate or extract large datasets in work or research, but my guess is that's a small minority of users. I bet the vast majority of university owned computers don't hold more than a few gig of real work data -- and those that do ought to destroy most of the data after use. So why does your laptop need hundreds of gigs of storage?

It costs $350 locally. Weighs just over 2 pounds. You could maybe make it a little bit cheaper by eliminating the hard drive, but the savings would be minimal and would not outweigh the loss of capacity. Even if people don't really need the storage for most applications, the marginal cost is not enough to quibble about it. Even if flash media continue to double in capacity every year, hard drive capacity isn't sitting still either And people want a place to store their photos and music.

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 5:33 PM, Steve Bogdanski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I have been using a Dell XPS M1330 with a 32GB SSD fro over a year now and have been nothing but pleased. Two caveats have been mentioned here before, defragmenting and swap/paging files. The first one it less of an issue and more of a bonus in my mind, because no matter how fragmented files become there is no real loss of performance (same speed to read or write anywhere on the drive).

Stephen Bogdanski
Network Services
College of Veterinary Medicine
Michigan State University