Just to keep it at the basic level, there is no difference to your system whether you use a spinning hard drive or an SSD once it installed. They are treated exactly the same way by your OS. I would suggest that you create separate partitions for your applications (games in your case) and the OS. That gives them separate drive letters in Windows even though they are on the same physical hardware. It is easy to do once you have Windows 7 installed. You can just look it up or I can tell you once you get that far. It isn’t mandatory but it does make maintenance, troubleshooting and general system tidiness easier in the long term. However, you can certainly make an SSD your C: drive and dump some or everything you want on it if you need or want to.
I’ve always wondered about this. What is the advantage of partitioning your hard drive? I’m familiar with partitioning for separate OSes, but unfamiliar in uses outside that.
It isn’t mandatory but it is a good idea to keep your apps and files on a separate partition. It makes backups much more simple and keeps things more tidy in general. For example, if your OS completely craps out, you can do a format and reinstall if you have it on a separate partition. That is bad news if you keep everything from applications to family photos on that same partition because you will lose everything on that drive during a reformat.
If you organize things well, you can set up your partitions so that things that are easily reinstallable like your OS are on one drive letter while apps and your actual content are on separate ones.
For example: I always set up mine so that drive C: is just the OS, drive D: is Applications and E: are personal documents and files. Drive E: has irreplaceable content on it so I can easily set up backups so that they target that drive and it doesn’t take up much space. That is much harder if you take a scattershot approach and spread files wherever they land on one drive letter. You would have to back up your whole computer regularly to make sure you get everything if you treat it as one big dumping ground.
I too have been considering installing an SSD while they are cheap. I will not be doing it before the Windows 10 upgrade next month so I am wondering how that will all work.
I assume that I would install 7 from my disk and then do the upgrade - np. But what would happen if I did it next year when the upgrade will cost £99? I will still only have a 7 disc.
Oh, thanks a lot! Now I’m having flashbacks to all those times as a kid when I was doing something on my parents’ Kaypro II and it would come up with “BDOS error on A” errors while accessing the floppy drive. (shiver)
First, what Compaq did was the “firewall” technique. One group figured out what all the routines in the BIOS did on an IBM, and told the other group the idea but not the actual code. “this subroutine is entered from this address and will poke the following values into the disk controller at this address, what and read the buffer…” The second group wrote their own code to perform the same acts. You can copyright specific code, but not the idea of what code does. (Later with VisiCalc, IIRC< the courts said “Look and feel”, i.e. exact layout of menus and the wording, was also copyright.)
The descriptions above have it pretty much right. A computer comes with BIOS code burned into ROM (Read-Only-Memory, except nowadays it’s flash and re-writeable too.) The BIOS among other things, allows the computer to read the “boot sector”, the very first sector, on any storage device. Basically, it knows about how to talk to disks, CDs, and USB storage. These, in turn, are designed to respond to low level “give me the following sector” commands. The program on the boot sector in turn loads a program (kernel) able to handle more complex loads, like how to find and load files by name. Once you can load files by name, the whole drive is fair game. (So obviously, whatever file format the boot drive uses -FAT, NTFS, etc. - is understood by the kernel program.
(The same concept applies to “boot from network”. The BIOS has a programmable boot order set - e.g. CD, disk, network - tries each in turn until one works. For network, it knows how to send a specific sequence saying “boot me” and waits for a response from a BOOTP server with the appropriate “loader” program>)
You may notice the display seems very primitive on some computers until the boot process is well under way. This is a good example - the BIOS, and then the elementary part of the kernel, may not know about the complex display (or multiple displays) hooked to the computer. So at first, it uses the BIOS - maybe just text - and then kernel routines; these should work with any compatible display. Once the kernel loads the driver, a program dedicated to the specific hardware of the installed display, takes over. Then you can get the super high resolution, high colour, and it can load files with nice pretty pictures. This “ramping up” to full control is typical of how drivers for all devices work - disks, displays, network cards, fancy keyboards with extra buttons, sound output, etc. Things like printers don’t need to work for the BIOS generally, they don’t talk to the computer until the full device drivers are loaded.
Of course companies like HP and Dell, like Apple for example, build the whole shebang and ship the installer - so they can modify the BIOS and kernel to include very fancy pictures and animations customized to the specific display hardware they installed. For generic box OS, the only requirement is that the disk and display for the installation is at the lowest level compatible with the BIOS… and almost every disk is, including SSD. (Actually, he controller that plugs into the disk is the more compatible component)
For DVD disk (or USB) installs, the first task is to force the BIOS to boot off that device instead of trying the lowest-number hard drive. Usually this is a BIOS menu option or setting. What manufacturers have done the last dozen years or more, they put the install on a separate “partition” on the hard drive shipped with the computer, rather than include the install DVD. The loader sends the boot to that partition, but the process is the same as the install from DVD - the loader loads a kernel which follows a program to copy the necessary files to the new boot drive, write the updated boot sector to the new drive, and then you reboot and the new OS takes over. Usually it is programmed to then run a “continue installing” program to detect the hardware, install supplied proper drivers to use that hardware to best effect, ask you for installation details like name, time zone, language preference, etc.
The OS itself is simply the kernel, once loaded by the boot sector, which then loads and runs a whole collection of libraries and drivers to produce whatever you want the computer to produce…