I have some advice for all those people thinking about getting a solid state hard drive: Don't do it until AFTER you have at least gone to 64-bit Vista and gotten your memory up to 8 GIGS.
Since the days of Windows 3.0 (or OS/2 2.0) the mantra has been "add more RAM" when it comes to improving system performance. But a few years ago, people started to quit saying that because, well, power users realized they had bumped up against the 4 gigabyte (really 3 gigabyte) limit of 32-bit Windows XP/Vista.
That's when we started looking for other ways to improve performance. For example, if our 32-bit OS could only see 3 gigs or so and a typical Vista set up is using say 1.5 gigs when doing serious work, that doesn't leave a lot for disk caching.
In days gone by, my 8 megabyte Windows 3.1 or OS/2 box would have at least 25% of those 8 gigs dedicated to disk caching (SmartDrv or OS/2's cache). I remember having a 4 gig disk cache when I went to 16 megabytes of system RAM.
And yet here we are in 2008, because of the limitations of a 32-bit OS, we find ourselves with very little memory available for things like disk caching. So what do we do? We discover the benefits of having the hard drive be RAM instead of addressing the underlying problem - we need more RAM.
So I upgrade my Thinkpad T400 to 8 gigs and the results are shocking. Despite the machine being far slower than my monster desktop machine at work, its performance feels about the same when it comes to loading things because there's so much memory available for caching. Right now, as I type this, Windows says it's using 2.6 GIGS for the disk cache. I've gotten rid of the swap file entirely and the system is just wonderful.
An SSD would be nice to be sure but they're extremely expensive (I know, I have 3 on various machines) and the performance gain is never as much as people hope outside of booting up which most power users rarely do.
Migrating to 64-bit Windows has been one of the most exciting things I've done with regards to PC tech since Windows 2000 came out.
One last point about 64-bit computing, the faster we get to it, the better off we all will be. Right now, PC games are up against the 2-gig limit per process of 32-bit Windows. It's a big problem (all those wonderful high resolution textures use a lot of RAM). Going to 64-bit will revolutionize games and many other applications and let's face it, memory is pretty cheap compared to the alternatives.
