Funny thing that when we change an element in a system most people don’t think through the other changes necessary. Funnier that I am guilty of that!

Few days ago I received my Intel x25-M SSD 80GB hard drive from the hardware magicians at SoftMart! I then copied the Vista OS over from my old conventional drive with Acronis MigrateEasy – which worked just as the title suggested. MigrateEasy allowed me to connect my old drive via a USB controller, copy the disk image of the Vista OS to a hard drive on the desktop, then rewrite it back to the new solid state hard drive again with the SSD connected via USB. There were no hitches, and upon insertion in my Lenovo x60, Vista booted just fine.

However, there were some strange crashes and issues. So I started to look around for best practices, and found little. CAVEAT: I don’t *know* that this stuff is the right way to go – it’s just what I am doing now   But here’s what I am using as my working best practices, gleaned mostly from common sense and some web forums and reviews:

• Turn off defragmentation in Vista: the random access time on these drives is very fast, and I am under the impression that the Intel drive is allocating blocks of data into the areas it deems best for performance – no sense having an algorithim optimized for a conventional hard disk try to move things around.
• Turn off Active Protection from lenovo: After turning this feature, which stops the hard drive when it detects g-forces like being dropped, I noted much less machine freezing. I don’t think solid state memory is to shock-sensitive enough to warrant this
• Turn off the disk paging file if you have enough RAM: paging to an SSD is pretty fast, but some folks are opining that it keeps writing and writing and that SSD’s are more sensitive to multiple writes. I rarely run out of RAM, so am going to try this.
• Turn off superfetch: again, no need to cache the info on the drive when apps start very fast anyways.

If I see any adverse effects on my machine I will post back. Let me know if you’ve ot some additional ideas.

For those iPhone gripes, please go to pleasefixtheiphone.com.

The top gripe: cut n paste.

My gripe (and 23 other folks right after I posted it!): no search in the email app!

There should be a generalized gripe list for every product – like SFDC’s ideas app, only universal. Yeah – I know people have created these – but we really need a dictator to decree that there should only be one per product, and then things would get done around here!

Several months ago I started at WebTrends. Today we kicked off the WebTrends blog. So I will be blogging about the biz over there. WebTrends is a fantastic company, and I’m happy to call them my tribe

Today, at the Irfan Colloqium sessions at Louhelen Baha’i School, I attended a talk by Arsalan Geula, the author of the book Iranian Baha’is from Jewish Background: A portriat of an emerging Baha’i Community. The talks were well attended, and the followup conversations proved very interesting, as many of the audience had stories of their own to share.

The talk was fascinating as it provides some deep original research into the actual stories behind the conversion of Jews to the Baha’i Faith during the 19th and early 20th centuries in Iran. Some of the most interesting documents were in Persian, but written in Hebrew letters.

Take a look at his new blog for more info, or click here to buy.