Crucial M4 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC SSD $200 at Tiger Direct

Sale on eBay ends Saturday, May 19th before noon. If you are on the fence about getting a SSD then this is an excellent choice. If you are replacing a HDD in an older laptop (like I did) then this SDD has what you are looking for - easy installation, big enough so you won't be losing much (if any) capacity, a cheap price, and above all screaming performance. I highly recommend this if you want to breathe new life into an older laptop running Vista or a low-end version of WIn7. Max out your RAM with some inexpensive memory from a computer recycler on eBay and the improvement in your performance will be jaw-dropping. I did just that for my older Sony laptop running Vista HP 32-bit and for a fraction of the price of a new laptop this machine is now nothing short of impressive. The only drawback is that this SSD doesn't come with cloning software and an external USB case to make the swap that much easier.

I installed a cheap Kanguru 128GB SSD ($90) and recycled RAM ($15) into my Mom's Acer netbook with Win7 Starter and it now runs like never before. Do this one time and you'll wonder why all laptops and netbooks don't come with a SSD.

A clean install of Win 7 seems to work better. I've done two of these, one clean, one cloned, and the cloned one is not as fast. The clean install is smoking hot fast, the cloned OS is just a touch slower feeling. Same basic systems inside, too.

Well worth the $200, a great price.

ssd

I bought this thing two weeks ago from Amazon. I semi cloned(used factory provided restore disk) my existing drive, it works fine but with occasional hiccups. Its not 100% stable. I dunno if a clean install is going to help. While the read speed of 500MB/sec is fine, the write speed of 260 MB/sec is 50% slower than the competition. But it does give you the promised read and write speed which is
Sequential Read: Up to 500MB/sec(SATA 6Gbps)
Sequential Write: up to 260 MB/sec (SATA 6Gbps) (SATA 6Gbps)