When I joined Avanade half a year ago they provided me with a very good laptop. It's a Dell 830 with a brilliant 1920x1200 resolution. At first I thought it was a bit small but nowadays I hardly ever use my Dell 24" monitor except for the occasional Hollywood download.

The processor is reasonable fast, it has 4GB of internal memory and they even put the decent IBM 7200rpm hdd in it.

For some reason however my machines always feel sluggish after a couple of months. Rather that going for a new install again I decided to take the plunge and get myself the Intel X25 SSD.

Ordering was easy and after two days it arrived at work in the afternoon. Obviously my teams productivity dropped to 0 as we had to install the drive first and test how fast it would be.

Initial speed experience was a bit of a disappointment. Copying Windows 7 from DVD took about 8 minutes. Now I know this is due to the limiting speed of the DVD but still.  :)

Installing Windows 7 took about 15 minutes, booting as promised only 25 seconds. Installing Visual Studio 2008 was kind of a surprise. I first copied everything on the hdd, then ran the installer. Took about 4 minutes to complete! SP1 which used to take over 40 minutes now only took about 6. Quite an improvement I must say.

Most important however is day to day speed. Firing up VS2008 is fast, it's still not instantly however. Loading projects is 2-3 times faster, but there still are loading times (also because of Resharper I guess).

One of the best improvements however is that the irritation on the noise of the hdd has completely disappeared. The only thing that's audible is the soft spinning of the fan. This means more focus to what I'm doing as opposed to what my machine should be doing. You don't care about the hdd anymore as you can't hear it's activity and the little hdd icon is hardly noticeable.

Building solutions, adding references, working with the file system in general; I never get distracted by a waiting time for some stupid IO anymore and development feels just that much snappier.

All in all, bit disappointed in the fact that loading still takes a bit time but very satisfied in the overall user experience my laptop now provides.