[buzzybee]

Still using a HDD here. Would like to transition, but holding out for better price/capacity ratios. It's really clear that it's the bottleneck for everyday use at this point; I recently went to 16GB RAM which stopped a lot of Windows swapping behavior, and now the major pain points are bootup, storage-intensive tasks, and bloated web sites.

[aphextron]

You should really get at least a 128gb drive for your OS and frequent applications. They're like $30 on Amazon nowadays. The speed difference is phenomenal - it's the single best upgrade you can make to a desktop PC right now.

[simooooo]

Use a ram disk for your browser cache

[comboy]

I don't know how exactly it works under Windows, but at least under Linux such optimizations usually don't pay off much since most used pages are already kept in the RAM anyway.

[j3097736]

My HDD on Linux barely has any disk access and is perfectly usable, meanwhile windows just loves trashing it for minutes, even with page file & unneeded services disabled.

[agumonkey]

RAM cached profile, dns proxy, makes for really smoother browsing on older machines.