Windows 7 Family Pack Available for Pre-Order

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

Last month, we posted about Microsoft's Anytime Upgrade and Family Pack pricing for Windows 7, and it looks like the latter is kicking off right now, in pre-order form. It's not yet available on Amazon.com, but both eCOST.com and Provantage have them listed - both for a price lower than we reported about before. eCOST's price is about $147, while Provantage's is $140. The latter is also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, so you can be confident about ordering it there.

As a refresher, the Windows 7 Family Pack is suited for those who already have a copy of Windows installed on their PC, up to three. For Windows Vista, the upgrade path is simple, as long as the editions and architecture match. If you're running XP, you can still upgrade, but it will have to be via a clean install (which I'd opt for - who doesn't love a clean machine?).

At $150, the cost per copy is $50, which is a relative steal given that a single upgrade copy of Home Premium sells for $120. Essentially, you're getting two extra copies for $15 each. The downside, is that these copies are supposed to be limited, so if you want to hook yourself up, you shouldn't waste anytime at all. If you missed the original half-price sale, don't make the same mistake twice!

Windows 7 is still set to be released on October 22, and I'd estimate that into the new year, we'll convert all of our test machines over to it from Vista, unless some good reason creeps up to stop us. Because Windows 7 supports TRIM, we're likely to begin using the OS well before the official release for our SSD content, since unfortunately, Microsoft is not planning to support TRIM in any previous OS, including Vista.

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Microsoft originally said Family Pack would only be available in North America. However, earlier this week the company extended its release to eight countries in Europe -- U.K., Ireland, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands and Sweden -- because of its decision to release Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8 installed in those countries.

Source: Yahoo! Tech​

 

[Merlin]

I'm curious about the TRIM feature and how it knows what to trim ( garbage ). What does it deem garbage?

 

[Kougar]

I'm curious about the TRIM feature and how it knows what to trim ( garbage ). What does it deem garbage?

Rather than try to explain it I'll borrow the wiki, they pretty much have it right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_(SSD_command)

Basically when you delete a file it doesn't delete the contents of a sector (on a hard drive) or the contents of a cell (on a SSD). This is how data recovery programs can recover deleted data, because only the LBA table entries that list valid data addresses is deleted. The physical data is still in the sector or cell.

A hard drive can overwrite the sector without a problem so it was a non-issue, but with SSD's writes cause a performance penalty. So what happens is with an SSD when it sees an empty LBA space, it goes to write to it and first must erase the associated cells before it can perform that write command. TRIM gives the OS the ability to tell an SSD what it should delete out of a cell when it removes the associate LBA address(es) for said data. So instead of waiting until it needs to write data to that available cell, the drive can clean out that cell immediately after being given the delete command and there is no performance loss later.

Now for technical reasons an SSD has to write to 512KB blocks at a time when it only needs to write 4KB of data, which further compounds the performance penalty involved in writes. Combining this with the above problem of waiting to clear cells until the moment it actually needs those cells, you can see how this now became a major issue. Hard drives can simply rewrite to a sector when needed so it was a non-issue for them.

 

[Rob Williams]

Basically when you delete a file it doesn't delete the contents of a sector (on a hard drive) or the contents of a cell (on a SSD). This is how data recovery programs can recover deleted data, because only the LBA table entries that list valid data addresses is deleted. The physical data is still in the sector or cell.

The file system plays a rather significant role also. I might not be 100% on all of this, but here goes...

For recovering data, there are two outcomes. First, if a file is deleted on, say, an NTFS file system, the LBA entries that link to the physical drive addresses aren't deleted, but rather queued up to be deleted or overwritten once the physical blocks on the disk are replaced with fresh data. If you are able to recover your data without issue, then you can be sure the LBA entries were still there.

The second outcome is that the LBA entries were actually deleted, which is usually caused by something more than a regular file deletion, such as a partition removal. You can sometimes get the data back fine, as the drive can record a small list of deleted partitions and their LBA, so if your file recovery software gets your data back fine, it did its job creatively.

If all LBA entries are lost, you can still get your data back, but you're going to get it back in an absolute mess. File names will be lost, file extensions will be mixed up and file sizes can vary from what they should be. Based on certain heuristics, some recovery software will detect what kind of file it's recovering, but it's still going to be a pain to sort through. This kind of recovery is typical on Linux file systems, because options like ext3 actually do completely clean the LBA entries once a file is deleted, unlike Windows.