I think they are even more important for laptops because otherwise you get slow 5400 rpm hdds. :( 

so boot times are one of the most unimportant things ever :-) (at least in the desktop pc) 

Well, I think boot times are something people use just as an example because almost everybody can relate to waiting for Windows to load. Pretty much anything that uses the disk is going to run a lot faster. When I double-click on Firefox, my homepage pops up in one second. Save games load very, very fast if the game is on the SSD. 

 

I shutdown/restart my computer only for applying Windows updates, but I do use sleep very extensively and SSDs provide a major boost to sleep/resume speed. 

i shut mine down everyday 

... but it never rebooted... still have to buy a new one :( 

will not benefit much from installing the game on a SSD...

Just ordered one online yesterday and was hoping that it will make loading a savegame in Doom3 as fast as loading in quake1 or doom2. 

Well, it did not for me but try it. If it works better for you, please say. 

when it arrives and gets installed in the system. 

by installing the game in a SSD. Definitely so.

I estimate that loading time is shortened by 1/3 or 1/2, but you still would notice that it is being loaded looking at the bar progressing visibly. 

Recently upgraded to 16GB ram, I thought of maybe plugging 32 just cause I can, but 8 was already plenty -- had to upgrade since some of it was faulty. I love how cheap RAM is nowadays. But now I really want to upgrade my GPU, it's just not cutting it anymore for the newer stuff. Right now I'm on some cheap ass 240GT, passive cooling tho, which is nice. What's the best bang for buck Geforce (sticking to nv) in the 100-200$ price range? GTX660 with dual slot fans seem to be coming up in the pricelists. 

That's it I guess. Though the '7 series has just started to launch. The 770 looks like good VFM. Maybe there'll be a 760 Ti or a 760 which could be worth witing for? 

The 770 is way over my budget though, I'dd never pay that amount for a gpu. I don't mind being behind on the curve a bit either. The thing with the waiting game is you never know how long it might take, and 'the next big thing' is always around the corner :P 

 

The Mac Mini actually seems suprisingly decent at running some light games, I was expecting to be only able to run stuff at low resolution, lowest details and still only get a barely playable fps due to only having an integrated Intel HD4000 GPU, but it's much better then that.

Playing in OS X, at 1280x720 (which is my native res cut exactly in half, so there are no distortion artefacts), details high to medium, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, COD: MW all run smoothly without any issues 

Running on a dual core Sandy Bridge at 2.1Ghz, and yeah, they game. Still no-where near to a proper graphics card, but functional. 

I'm asking you as a guru of the modern hardware etc/

So actually whats the differens between gtx 670 and 770

i know - gtx 770 it is basically upgraded 680, but

its seems i cant handle to upgrade my card third time in a few years :) 

And 192 more 'shader units' (think like a core in a CPU) in a 770 than the 670. The clocks are also faster than the 680, though it is kinda the same card.... 

That is a good deal. 

Hey, does anyone here do any laptop component replacement?

I have an oldish HP 4520s with a regular 2.5" HDD and I want to replace it with an SSD. (and probably replace with more ram while I'm in there).

Am I right in assuming that apart from the hardware and case differences, there should be no problem with hardware compatibility and such with laptops?

Any words of advice? 

I've swapped out the stock HDD for my HP 4520s for an intel 530 SSD. When in any operating system, it performs perfectly. The bios was already set for ahci so I didn't need to do the registry key trick to get it going.

There's only one problem: every *other* time I boot up, the drive is not detected at all. It does this consistently:
Drive detected
Reboot
Drive not detected.
Power off, Power on, (note, won't detect if I Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart)
Drive detected

This happens no matter what OS I boot into, Windows 7 or Ubuntu (from a flash drive).

I transferred the old data from my HDD (500gb) onto the SSD (180gb) using the dd command on linux.
I had to shuffle some partitions around (as well as shrink one) to get it to fit on my SSD.

Here are the paritions:
[300mb system partition]
[400~gb C: Windows partition]
[15gb HP recovery crap]
[2gb HP tools crap]

Because the C: partition was in the middle, i had to do these steps:
Using windows disk management, shrunk C: partition to 95gb.
Booted into Ubuntu
With GParted, Moved HP recovery and tools partition adjacent to the end of the C: partition
Used dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb to clone entire HDD to SSD

Any ideas? 

btw: I did get an error from dd saying something about no space left, but by the time that error occured, it would have been writing unallocated sectors anyway. 

I am no expert. I recently installed a SSD in my desktop and will never go back to HDD for the OS drive.
Does the drive show on the POST screen? Then does it get lost to the OS or is it hardware not found in bios? If you boot from a USB stick is it the same?
A quick google search shows you are not alone with the problem.
https://www.google.com/#q=intel%20530%20ssd%20not%20recognized

I found this
https://communities.intel.com/message/217160
Firmware might be the fix.
I'd suggest you have a good backup until you can trust the drive. 

When it happens, the drive is completely undetected and doesn't show up in the BIOS.

When booting to a USB Ubuntu, if the SSD was not detected, then Ubuntu bootup would usually hang right at the start right after the GUI is loaded, otherwise it boots up normally (and the SSD shows up normally).

I suspected it might be something firmware related, but I really wanted to confirm that somehow before trying to update that. Unfortunately, whenever I find a post about it, it doesn't seem to match exactly what I see myself.