A bunch of flash storage chips (like in your digital camera or iPod) with a SATA connector that behaves like a conventional hard drive, only five times as fast, half as hot, and with no noise. So in other words, in my new system there is no spinning hard disk anymore, at all.

But it's expensive storage - 300EUR for 128GB in my case, whereas a normal mechanical drive would be 70EUR for 500GB, or at worst 200EUR for 300GB (a WD Velociraptor, fastest mechanical drive).

IMHO right now, if you can get it without compromising on other parts of the build, it's worth it. In my case I managed a nice balance between GFX Power, CPU Power and HD Power - but if you had to sacrifice CPU or GPU for the SSD, it's not a good deal.

Okay, small update:

Fallout3 runs like butter and without any troubles. 60 steady FPS at super ultra max settings certainly brought a smile to my face. No Quad-Core bugs either, as Allen warned me.

Most of my productive software works, even though it's older. Macromedia Flash 8 disables Aero when loaded, not compatible. Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 - ancient version - runs just fine.

Nero 6 or 7 OEM will not work, but I found a bunch of free apps I need to test.

But so far, transition to W7 and 64bit is pretty pain free, outside of the Stalker troubles.

Love the feature of pinning program icons to the task bar (the new "quicklaunch" bar). Especially the right-click added features on these pinned icons are awesome.

Any more updates ?

My system is arriving Friday. Any useful tips on configuring Win7 ?

Here is my system
-------------------------------

Coolmaster Storm Sniper mid tower (appropriate since I did some time as a sniper in the US Army)
800 watt power supply
i7-920 with minimum 10% overcocking
Asetek LCLC 240 Liquid Cooling system w/ 240MM Radiator and Dual Fans (Extreme Overclocking Performance + Extreme Silent at 20dBA)
Asus P6T Intel X58 Chipset SLI/CrossFireX Mainboard Triple-Channel DDR3/1600 SATA RAID w/ eSATA,GbLAN,USB2.0,IEEE1394a,&7.1Audio (3-Way SLI Support)(Venom Boost Extreme OC Certified)
6 GB Corsair Dominator RAM(All Venom OC Levels Certified)
ATI Radeon HD 5870 PCI-E 16X 1GB DDR5 Video Card
128 GB Kingston 2.5 inch SATA Gaming MLC Solid State Disk (Nearly Instant Data Access Technology)
Two 22X DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW Dual Layer Drives
NZXT Sentry-2 Fan Touch Screen Fan Control & Temperature Display
All-in-One External USB 2.0 Card Reader
Microsoft® Windows® 7 Home Premium (64-bit Edition)
Not worth listing all the USB, Firewire, Lan,mouse, keyboard, etc stuff


Total $1,829 incl ship (that is with the $83.90 coupon discount)

Nero 7 works great on Win 7 Pro 32bit. You have to download the newest version from their website though. Don't bother installing the one on the CD because you will just have to uninstall it. The version I have is 7.11.10.

Okay, the last few things I discovered

Vsync with ATI is also not working for BoBII. Generally the thing seems to be that for applications that not nativley offer Vsync, ATI can't force it at least not on Win7 x64. You definitely want the D3DOverrider application that comes with the latest Rivatuner downloads. You can discard Rivatuner (for me, that is too detailed to play around with it) but the D3DOverrider is a separate application, installs no drivers, you just open it when playing a game and it keeps Vsnyc.

Flat Panel Scaling: I think it's the same with Nvidia as with ATI: On the Win7 drivers, the Flat Panel Scaling (GPU Scaling in ATI Terms) options are by default grayed out on the windows desktop. I used this option in XP to get BoBII menus (which are 1024x768) up to 1920x1200 so my screen would not constantly switch resolutions around between menu and 3d part of the game. But on W7, these were gray and unable to be selected.

The fix is to lower the desktop resolution BELOW your native LCD resolution, for example to 1920x1080, then the grey options become selectable. Once you set a scaling option, you can then return the desktop to full resolution, and the option will again be grayed out, but stick with what you selected. I read the same about NVidia, so it's likely something within W7.

TrackIR: I had installed v4 of the Software (for my TIR4Pro) and it was working fine with Thirdwire sims, but failed to recognize FS2004. I was tearing my hair out, v5 of the Software however worked fine. At the NP support forum we then discovered that you have to install the software using rightclick "run as administrator" on the setup. Then it recognized FS2004.

So, that's another important lesson: When you are installing applications in W7, even if you have admin rights, it never hurts to use "run as administrator" especially if the software is also adding drivers. Obviously TIR v4 did a very weird "partial working" install because some rights weren't given when I ran it as normal user in the administrator group.

For Burning Software, I now use Ashampoo Burning Studio 2010 (Free Version) which does everything including Blu Ray and Lightscripe. You get a free full version key from the Ashampoo website, which is yours forever. Nero has a Version 9 Lite also for free download from the website, but it lacks burning of iso images to disk.

I installed the VPN Software from my company network which is a pretty deep system-level app, using the Vista x64 download, and that one also works. So far Win7 really has not refused any program I threw at it.

Start menu weirdness: I like to sort my programs in my "All programs" menu by hand, so that I find what I need often at the top of the pack. Very early I had already disabled "Sort alphabetically" for the W7 menu (all these options are under taskbar-rightclick-properties-start menu).

Yet still, after a day or two, my apps would again be sorted by name. Until I figured out that there's another option "highlight latest installed programs" which also has to be disabled, otherwise everytime you add a new software, the whole non-alphabetical order goes to hell.

For mobile devices, I was pleasantly surprised: My HTC Touch with Windows Mobile 6.0 was instantly recognized when I plugged the USB Cable in, Windows Update downloaded the drivers and software, and it was synching with my Outlook in no time. For XP, it always was a bother since ActiveSync was not freely available as download, and it didn't always recognize the connected device either. Of course also no problems with iTunes and the iPod.

I finished setting up everything on sunday and did a full image backup to VHD on an external drive. This built-in W7 backup is slightly slower than Acronis (doesn't use as much compression on the files, so more to write) but works okay. I also test-started a recovery booting from the Win7 DVD, and that works - it loads a mini-windows where you can point to the external USB drive and apply the backup image to your hard drive, bringing the entire system to the state you last did a backup. Highly recommended if you have a small system/applications drive with lots of custom settings.

Performance-wise, the i7-860 continues to impress. Going by benchmarks, the Phenom X4 965 would have beaten my previous AMD 5000+ by max about 180% (for example in Armed Assault from 17 to 25 FPS), but the i7 seems to do triple the amount of work (Arma at 30+ FPS), and with very little heat.


So in summary: I totally changed hardware, I changed GFX brand, I changed OS and I went 64bit. By any common logic, that was pure madness switching so much in a single move. But the biggest issues actually came from the GFX driver, which I could have avoided by going with Nvidia. So the conclusion seems to be that switching from 32bit XP to 64bit Win7 is actually less painful than switching from Nvidia to ATI - and that says something about the usability of the new OS. And ZERO problems with x64, too.