Christopher Keslin

All I have to say is WOW.  If you want to breath new life into laptop or even workstation read on…

I have to stick with Vista as my primary work horse because the majority of my time is spent developing applications that require IIS7 (WAS).  While VMs are an option and I use them for many different development tasks, they are quite a bit slower and I’m not working on a lot of different projects these days. 

My primary development machine is a lenovo (IBM) T60 Thinkpad w/ 4GB RAM and two 100GB 7200RPM SATA internal drives w/ Vista x64 Business installed.  A fairly beefy laptop and I’ve been really happy with its performance, but once it starts swapping it can get rather SLOW…  Some digging revealed it was disk I/O I was waiting on most the time, enter the SDD to the rescue.

After getting everything reinstalled and working with the new configuration I noticed some improvement but it just didn’t jump out at me.  Boot time was the most notable change going from 4 minutes from power to usable down to approximately 90 seconds from power to usable.  A boost to say the least but not the productivity enhancer I was hoping for.

Then it happened, I ran into an issue that would be faster to just plug in my old hard drive to take care of than going through the process of configuring my laptop to work on the problem at hand.  After going through the painful boot up and loading visual studio I couldn’t believe how slow the computer was.  Visual Studio was constantly performing disk I/O (most likely resharper’s cache) and everything just seemed to crawl once I had three instances of VS 2008 up and running.

All in all I’m extremely happy with the purchase and realize that I just can’t go back to 7200 RPM laptop drives *sigh*…  Hopefully the prices on the SDD’s will keep coming down, and soon