So it seems the bottleneck of fast systems would be their hard disk drives. Slow to read, slow to write, and the head can only be at one place at a time, travelling to other places as required. Cost around 10c a gigabyte.

So i decided to eliminate this bottleneck of "windows experience index 5.9". Researched and found that the new SandForce controlled SSDs are capable of around 280MB/s read and write. Thats alot faster than 60MB/s for a standard 7200rpm drive. Downside was, they cost about $4.50 a gigabyte. Ok so bought a "120GB" OCZ Vertex 2 drive. Of course i forgot even SSDs gimmick their ratings, and it turns out to be actually 111.7GB of space.

I thought ... ok with Windows 7 Home Premium i'd just make a OS image and a restore would take a few minutes. Removed old drive, plugged in SSD, hooked old drive to eSATA and/or USB.

4 hours later, failed to restore image.
- when i tried to restore initially into a blank drive, it restored image not onto SSD, but onto the HDD. weird. formatting the blank drive didnt help either.
- tried cloning the HDD 100MB system partition + OS partition (yeah no idea why Win 7 does that kind of install!) onto SSD - unable to boot. Repaired -> boots into "Preparing Desktop for Use" and then it just stops. Maybe something wrong somewhere - turns out Win 7 strongly believed i was using a "non-genuine copy" - maybe that's why it hung.
- tried to repair using image restore now that there was something in the SSD - "crucial disk not found" or something like that, restore unable to proceed

in the end i just reinstalled everything. 6 hours from the beginning everything was great. then i did some reading called "optimizing your SSD"  - i'm only going to state the optimizations for win 7.

Turns out there are a few crucial bits

1) your SSD must be "aligned" - ie it has cells of sorts of 4kb sizes. if its been formatted such that the partition has cells misaligned to the physical 4kb space it not only goes real slow but dies young. thankfully there are tools like Paragon Alignment tool which tells you whether it's aligned or not, and can align your SSD on the fly. thankfully windows 7 is superior to XP in that it knows how to align things from the start. phew.

2) there are additional drivers to make it work fast: as i have intel Mobo, i needed to download "intel matrix storage manager" and "intel rapid storage technology" which provides sata drivers. (prior to IMSM my SAT score was only 5.9 still post that on its own shot up to 7.7)

3) sometimes if your SSD can't work you need to run it in IDE then fool win 7 into making work in AHCI mode. it seems my mobo has no IDE and it just works in AHCI straight off - i dont know why it's such a big deal on the net.

4) now the more you write on the SSD the slower it gets and the faster it dies.
to prevent early death:
- stop defragging it
- stop prefetching (apparently prefetching causes drive activity to increase due to re-placement of files for easy access
- stop indexing and windows search

to prevent slowdown
- the most important seems to be complete wiping of empty cells. windows 7 has this feature called TRIM. win 7 sends a command to your SSD control telling it that certain cells are no longer needed. the controller than wipes it clean. trouble is, it's very very very difficult to know if the cells are wiped clean. the most i know how to do is to go to CMD and check "fsutil query behavior disabledeletenotify" if it is 0 trim commands are sent when you delete stuff. also i am told if you hard drive is very active after you delete stuff TRIM is working. i'm also told i need to leave my system completely IDLE ie NO active process activity for a few hours to get TRIM going. huh i thought trim happens straightaway? who knows!
- disable superfetch - no idea why apart from it's not needed
- dont do repeated benchmarking - wait a few days for it to recover, says the internet

also because there isnt much space on the drive we need to maximise drive space
- cut pagefile right down to 32MB
- remove hibernation
- disable system restore at your own risk
- dont have so much stuff on it!

after all that i now have a lot less space, a windows experience index of 6.7 (graphics card) and things happen WAYYYYYYY faster! i found that it never hits the claimed 280MB/s burst max nor the fast write speeds claimed. but since all the other older drives have the same $/GB i thought the new Sandforce SSDs are the way to go at the moment. immensely fast read speed on its ownn with very fast write speed (if it cant do immensely fast write - probably coz my drive is not new anymore) is acceptable.