Upgrade my PC before or after I install W7?

[The Wikir Man]

This isn't much of an issue from my understanding unless you use a swap file on it. Loading apps is a read-only operation, code source files are one write a minute perhaps when working.

It's my dev PC on which I will work 8-12 hours a day. Why would speed not be an issue? Otherwise I could be using my old P4. I reckon a SSD would make my system more balanced, reducing the time the CPU is stalled waiting for the disk.

Since you don't know what you are going to do with the SSD, it's a moot point. As far as I am concerned, it's only worth investing in a more expensive technology if I know what benefits I can expect, and how best to reap them - clearly from your initial question, you don't.

Isn't the benefit of having something that is quicker for disk operations is that you use it for disk operations, rather than using it for something that you load once from and then don't access again?

Do you know how long the CPU is stalled waiting for the disk? For the work that you typically do, do you know what the disk and memory operations are like? You would get a speed advantage by having that extra 1GB RAM that you ask "is it worth it?" available as a RAM disk and sticking temporary files in there. Having a 1GB in memory swap file would probably make the system quicker, assuming that Windows can support such a thing.

[VectraMan]

I have W7 ultimate 32/64 so I've the choice. I don't run any legacy apps so I'm probably ok. Though for 1 GB more RAM, is it worth it?

Maybe. But is there any point to installing the 32-bit version and not having the extra RAM? I'd say not, from my experience.

I've always wondered about the effect of SSDs on C++ build times too. So maybe you could try it and let me know?

[stingman123]

Upgrade the PC first, then install Win 64 bit

Does the SSD support TRIM? if not, forget it...

[doodab]

The increased responsiveness with an SSD makes a really noticeable difference. You spend less time waiting for your computer. It's as big or a bigger difference than going from a single-core to a dual-core processor.

My only regret is that I only bought the 80GB one because I thought €400 was too much to spend on something that might be a let down (damn the recession!)

I used it to hold eclipse + some VMs that were really chugging on the external drive I use with my laptop. At home, I use RAID to get the throughput but on a laptop there is nowhere to put an x8 PCIe card so I thought I would give SSD a go, and the speedup really was amazing. The VMs start up in seconds, one upgrade (to an app server on a win 2003 VM, which involves a lot of database accesses) which took about 2hrs to run on the mechanical drive took a couple of minutes on the SSD, and eclipse is about 10x faster running in a VM on the SSD than it was running in the host OS.

I was going to buy a 160GB one to use as my boot drive but I read somewhere that Intel have a new iteration coming out sometime in Q2 2010, so I've put the 80GB one in there for now. It really is like having a new computer.

Edit: I would agree get one that supports TRIM, I did notice a slow down on writes after a while when I had mine connected via the eSATA card that doesn't support it. It went back to normal when I installed it as the boot drive and run the optimizer tool.