How To Increase The Life of Your SSD Drives On Windows 7

Having a SSD (Solid State Drive) is the perfect way to give your existing windows 7 system a speed boost. But the life expectancy of an SSD drive is far less than that of a normal IDE/Sata hard-drive. So I decided to write this guide to help people understand how we can get the most out of our SSD drives by improving performance and life expectancy 


Follow The Below Steps To Increase The Life of Your SSD Drives On Windows 7


1 - Disable. Windows Indexing Service. Click on start and type in services.msc and hit enter. Double click on "Windows Search" and set it to disabled. Next click on the "My Computer" icon on the desktop, then right click on the SSD drive (Usually C Drive) and click on properties, Then make sure "Allow files on this device to have contents indexed" is unticked, Click apply then ok.

2 – Disable System Restore. Right click on “My Computer” icon on the desktop and select properties. Click on system protection tab. Select your drive and click on configure now select Turn off system protection.

3 – Disable Auto Running Of Defrag. Click on the "My Computer" icon on the desktop, then right click on the SSD drive (Usually C Drive) and click on properties. Click tools tab, click Defrag now, click configure schedule. Untick the box “Run on a schedule” then click ok.

4 – Disable Superfetch. Click on start and type in services.msc and hit enter. Double click on "Superfetch" and set it to disabled

5 – Disable Windows Paging File. Right click on “My Computer” icon on the desktop and select properties, then select Remote Settings > Advanced > Performance Settings > Advanced Tab > Change. Untick the box at the top then select your SSD drive and select no paging file. If you have another hard-disk in your computer you could move the paging file to there.

6 – Disable Windows Defender Scheduled Scan – Go to the control panel, click on windows defender, Click Tools > Options then untick “Automatically scan my computer” then click on save

7 – Disable Unwanted Programs From AutoLaunch. Click start then type in msconfig and hit enter. Now click on the startup tab and untick anything that you do not need windows to run once it has started. If you are unsure what to disable please post here before disabling it. 

8 – Anti-Virus. Make sure your anti-virus program does not have a scheduled virus scan, Disable it if it does. 

9 – Turn off application updates – With certain programs such as adobe reader and java they can be configured to automatically check if newer versions are available, if newer versions are available they will also automatically downloaded, which means writing files to your SSD.

10 – Check Task Manager For Top I/O Processes – Open task manager by pressing “CTRL + Shift + ESC” Click on “Show processes from all users” click on the processes tab, then sort the “I/O Reads” by max to min. Now take a look at the top processes of I/O Reads and is there funny processes there?? It is possible that there is a process that takes up a lot of I.O that you could stop. If you are unsure about a process post about it in our forum. Repeat the above process for the “I/O Write” column 

11 – Check Task Scheduler – Go in to the control panel and click on scheduled tasks. Disable tasks in there that you do not need. There might be a task in here to do a full virus scan on your PC or something similar. If your not to sure what you can disable post about it in our forum.

12 - Stop And Disable Unwanted Windows Services. Click on start and type in services.msc and hit enter. Now double click on a service you don’t need and set it to disabled, then reboot your machine for it to take effect. Below is a list of services you might consider to disable.

Audio Service – Only disable if you don’t want audio on your system
Branch Cache – This caches network content
Computer Browser – If you disable this service your computer will not popup in the mynetwork for the domain
Disk Defrafmenter – Your system will not be able to defrag with this disabled
Print Spooler – Disable only if you never plan to print anything from your system
Server Service – Disable if you don’t plan to share any files / printers on your system
Themes – If you don’t use windows 7 themes disable this service
Windows Audio - Only disable if you don’t want audio on your system
Windows Audio Endpoint Builder - Only disable if you don’t want audio on your system

13 - Install Programs On Sata Drive – If possible only install the OS on your SSD drive and install programs on a secondary sata / IDE drive.