New
#1
brand of SSD matters
If you can afford it, an SSD is so incredibly awesome for Windows 7. The machine boots in 30 seconds; applications are turbocharged. It actually makes bloated Microsoft software enjoyable.
One thing is that I learned the hard way that the Micron SSDs (the RealSSD C300 256GB) do not play well with Windows 7. The Micron SSDs would freeze and cause Windows to crash, usually at inconvenient moments. This was not just one bad drive instance; to avoid the full system install with all of my apps and data, I tried doing system restore to move from one Micron drive to an identical drive. I did this three times. My guess is that it is something to do with the firmware; I checked - I had the latest firmware. Those three devices are going back to the reseller as defective.
Still not wanting to give up SSDs, I tried an Intel 300 GB drive and it works great. No crashes. Well, almost no crashes. I've found that if I set (in the Lenovo Thinkvantage Power manager) my CPU speed to highest, and then run an IO intensive job (a big unison for example across a big directory), Windows 7 crashes, slowly and painfully, as jobs die. My theory on this is that the SSD is so fast, that the CPU becomes the bottleneck, and is busy 100%, and slowly gets hot. Or maybe it is my DRAM getting hot. Whatever it is, the solution is to set the power settings to Adaptive. That stops the crash.