P180 - Software questions

My first question is regarding my hard drive config: As you can see from my sig i have both a 120gb SSD and a 750 secondary drive.

The programs i will have running at day 1:
Adobe Photoshop CS5
Possibly Adobe Lightroom
Starcraft II
Fallout 3
Rage
SWTOR
Microsoft Office enterprise
Im not sure if its the same name for windows 7, but the XP version is Microsoft Visual C++ express (just need a good C++ compiler)
COD MW3
Maybe BF3
Shogun 2
Terra when it is released

My main question is which programs will i see good performance gains if they are loaded onto the SSD instead of the HDD.

When im editing photos in photoshop, i must use bridge to sort through anywhere from 400-1000 photos at a time, will this go faster if while i am working on a batch of photos if i put them on the SSD for load times in bridge then delete them or otherwise move them to one of my 2 externals? (2 backups) Also if im doing this often can frequently removing as much as 8-10gb at a time to/from the drive cause fragmenting?

My next question is in regards to drivers. i know their were some problems regarding crossfire drivers, but from what i read in the owners lounge the newest 12.1 ccc software/driver package works fine, is this still the best driver to run.

And in regards to mobo/wireless adapters and every other driver needed, does MALIBAL ship the disc the send with the newest drivers for each of these parts or are they going to be default drivers? is there any reason not to DL and use the newest drivers?

Last question is about win7 optimization. With Windows XP i could typically single out programs in msconfig to disable that i did not need to use and could disable in the startup menu, but im not familiar with windows 7 as i have never used it. does anyone know of a guide online that could tell me which programs i can disable from running at startup. Are there any specific things from MALIBAL that will appear in that list that i should NOT disable to run the clevo hardware and touch buttons and such?

 

I wouldn't recommend installing games on the SSD, it should only improve loading times... although some people have managed to get SWTOR to work suprisingly fast with a SSD

Regarding your main and second question, yes you will see gains ONLY in loading, aka your PS will load pictures and manage several add-on's better.

Crossfire drivers should work fine, although problems CAN, but will mostly not, occur no matter what, you can't prevent that.

I'm not sure about the drivers, I would assume that some resellers do upgrade instantly while others had a image file with the drivers, which would require for new batch of drivers to be download by yourself.

In W7 you can single out programs too, MSCONFIG works the exact same way, I can promise you that +some other options included

EDIT: Oh and the things in Bold are the things that will benefit the most with a SSD, atleast that's what I know of

 

Your photos and applications will definitely be quicker to load when on the SSD. Games won't benefit as much because the SSD will only help with level loading time, not regular performance. SSD's don't fragment because they don't work the same way as HDD's (they don't have to "seek" to find non-sequential data), so that's never going to be an issue on that drive. Your mechanical drives may still suffer from it though if you're doing lots of back and forth copying.

The driver CD won't have the most up to date installs, so I'd recommend using the link below to get the newest ones:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/573379-clevo-driver-thread.html

You can still use msconfig in Windows 7. Just be sure you don't uncheck services related to your operating system and you'll be OK. Removing known programs shouldn't affect anything.

 

Shogun 2 would benefit being in an SSD as well, it was terribly annoying to wait for a few minutes loading times just to have your massive army kill off a small group of archers (unless you like to auto battle )

 

really? i was totally unaware that SSDs could not fragment, thats excellent. If thats the case id probably just copy the photos to the SSD rather than cut or move, and then just save the edited ones to whatever drive i want them on

thanks for the feedback everyone