Spring has come and a young mans mind gets onto the idea of upgrading the computer, well a 51 year olds does!

I am happy with my current motherboard and processor, and my plan is to have Windows 7 on a 256gb ISSD for amazing speed, increase the memory to 4gb to cope with Windows 7 - happy days

On choosing a SSD, there seems to be problems with controllers for them, and firmware updates, and bugs and being a total pain to set up. I naively thought it would be a plug it in and install Windows on it.

Any opinions, advice?

if you buy one of the current batch of SSD drives is is just a straight swap for your old disk based hard drive. ive been running SSDs for a while in a few of my computers. They are indeed very quick, and nothin much to worry about with them. You do need to know things like not defragging them, as it can reduce the lifespan of them, but other than that its all good. especially now they have come right down in price

Im running 80Gb intel Gen 2 drives in my laptops, but im just about to splash out of one of the 240Gb Sandisk Extreme drives that use the newer Sandforce 2281 controllers

Davey, interesting you mention life of SSD....

Have you seen any figures for life expectancy?

The cells in the chips in an SSD only have a finite number of reads/writes, so you dont want to be doing things like defragging which moves data around the drive, or running lots of drive performance tests use lots of read/write commands which are unnecessary. If you are a normal computer user not doing anything out of the norm, then a SSD should last you for 8 or so years