Don't take shit so personally, you fucking retard. you're complaining because i'm giving him advice on an OEM installation? are you that fucking stupid? You're right, let me avoid giving him any advice whatsoever that may pertain to the question at hand, including giving him links so he can read about the features on his chipset, advising him on firmware updates and whatever else I can manage to think up with my dumb brain. Gwence, go fuck yourself you shit-for-brains worthless troll. If you're gonna help the man you do it properly instead of nitpicking about useless shit so you can get a jab in on me. You were a complete useless douchebag a year ago and I'm glad nothing's changed. Are we done here?
Good.
Dfn, you'll likely have to wipe the OS on your HDD because you'll be using it as a storage device and you can't wipe windows that easily, even if it's on another HDD so it'll sit there wasting space. You could potentially create another partition to keep all your stuff on and wipe only the OS and your current install from the current partition, but that may create problems (windows doesn't pack data neatly and can erase shit when increasing or decreasing partition sizes). Keep your OS partition on your HDD until you've made sure that you're up-to-date on the firmware and you'll need to boot into an OS to do that. You can do it with a linux boot disk or USB, but it's just easier since you'd already have a Windows OS to do that from.
What SSD did you buy, btw? because Marvell recently uncovered they were having issues with their drives and SandForce is notorious for their problems. Crucial hasn't yet issued a firmware update for the new problem but there should be a fix within a week or two, and the SandForce issue has more to do with compatibility than the drive dying, but a relatively new firmware update (think it was released in october or november?) has fixed many of the issues people were having. If you've got a SandForce drive make sure to read the SSD manufacturer's forums to see if there's any compatibility issues because it may require a driver update.
Great guide for an SSD install
You can use this to benchmark the SSD drive and make sure it's running optimally.
http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Solid-S...p/79094#M24083
Now let's wait and see what stupidity Gwence has decided to inject into this thread.