Monthly Archives: October 2009

Activate AHCI in Win 7

Last week I decided to start playing around with Windows 7 on my laptop … just to see how it’s going to work.

Luckily I have a spare SATA hard drive, so there was no risk that I would damage anything permanently.   If the Windows 7 install went bad, I could simply switch back to XP on the original hard drive.

Well, it’s been a little more than a week with Windows 7 and I’m quite impressed.

One thing I noticed is that the hard drive controller wasn’t for the AHCI I thought was configured.   Then I remembered, when I had the motherboard replaced due to the video problems, the default hard drive controller settings would be in place … and the default is to use ATA instead of AHCI.

Theoretically, AHCI should give me better performance than standard ATA.

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