when the machine gets really slow I see from the task manager that the cpu is maxed out but the ram is always trundling along at about 50%. Would this suggest that disk access and swap space is not part of the bottleneck?
If so, getting a faster disk accesss by SDD will have little effect upon speed once all applications have launched fully. Getting it to boot up in a shorter time might be worth it. The jury is still out.
I just checked out the C and D drives in the machine (partitions on same physical drive) and am surprised to see that D drive, which only has 11GB of OS backup files, is 120GB total. C drive is a mere 91GB of space. Why would the D partition be bigger than the C partition? In fact the spare space on D partition is bigger than the entire C partition. Good reason or Friday afternoon, back from the pub, build?