Dual boot / Dual Drive queries

Your SSD will appear in Safely Remove because AHCI driver and BIOS setting confers hotplugging ability, and this is how many mobo's enable safe SSD hotplugging and unplugging.

If the install starts up with the placeholder Standard VGA driver under Display, then in my experience about 70% of the time the newer driver will come in on early optional Windows Updates - up from perhaps 50% before SP1.

The first driver to look at with performance problems or missing (Nvidia) Co-Processor is Chipset, but often the installer's/Updates chipset is better than the OEM's.

I see, I appreciate your explanations, as you say this is definately the place to learn the new ways of working with W7. The stuff about AHCI makes sense now, my first thought when I saw it was: "hmm, don't want to accidentally click SSD instead of my USB stick"!

Wolfgang, if OP were intending to use AHCI hotplugging to unplug SSD while powered up, wouldn't he first Safely Remove?

You can be assured the SSD is solidly fixed inside my case so hotplugging it won't be necessary Besides would it even be possible to remove the OS drive while it was running the OS?

w/ regards to the SSD, the optimisation guide that theog linked was a good read and looks to gather together all the bits and pieces of info I've found around the net on tweaking the OS for SSDs [page file, hibernation file, etc] so I'll be following that for getting things set up right. As far as RAM goes I'm maxed on my board at 8Gb, which on occassions has been fully utilised, so I think I'll follow the guides advice and set it to 1Gb for now.