I built my computer in December of 2007 and since then I have made a few upgrades: from 2GB RAM to 4GB, from a Dual-Core CPU to Quad-Core, a mechanical keyboard and gaming mouse to name a few examples. I never blogged about those upgrades but I'm going to blog about my most recent one: a new Solid State Drive and Windows 7!
OCZ Vertex 4 128GB Solid State Drive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227791 ($90, on sale from $150)
Solid State Drives are the way of the future as they can achieve almost 10-50x the speed of traditional spinning Hard Drives. I installed this puppy this past weekend without having to buy any extra peripherals. It is SATA III speed, but it's backwards compatible since my motherboard is not SATA III. I had to set my BIOS SATA detection from AHCI to IDE in order to detect the drive, but after that it was smooth sailing.
Windows 7 Home Edition 64-bit - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116986 ($100)
Why not Professional Edition you ask? Just google the difference and you'll see that Home Edition has all the stuff a typical user needs. I am not running my computer as a server or anything, so Home Edition was adequate for me! I've been stuck on Windows XP for a while now, so I installed Windows 7 onto the SSD with no problems!
The end result is an Operating System that loads super-fast! I put all my applications on my 128GB SSD: Windows 7 and games like StarCraft 2. I then keep my 300GB SATA around for storage purposes. This method of storing data is actually exercised in the high-end disk enterprise world. It's now common to store your hot data (things you access a lot and frequently) on SSD and cold data on slower, spinning drives.
Now I am super happy with my computer and should not have to upgrade it for another couple years!
