My God! Amongst all the ill-informed, mis-information, and misguided hate, the light of reason and truth finally shines from behind the clouds of ignorance!! It's truly sad that the loudest voices are usually the least informed or most blinded. Sadder yet that statement doesn't just apply to programming languages.

I believe build times are much more tied to the CPU than disk performance -so an SSD probably won't help much. You can verify by watching the HDD light on your computer - if it's going nuts expect an SSD to help, if it's only blinking occasionally, then don't expect an SSD to make a big difference. I do highly recommend getting an SSD, especially for laptops. Expect huge performance increases anytime disk access occurs, expect no performance increase when the CPU is the bottleneck. After switching to my SSD, there were huge performance increases in opening and closing programs. There were also "responsiveness" increases within applications that access the drive or cause memory swapping - huge gains in VS 2008.

I can't remember which controller the Kingston drive uses, check anandtech.com > storage for much good information. Basically, don't buy an SSD with a jMicron controller - that is the golden rule. As far as controllers go - Indilinx, Intel, Sandforce are good. Samsung is OK but there is better. Is it worth it? Well, frankly, if you earn your living on your computer it is insanity to not make this small investment. For instance -- I do most of my work on a Core2 laptop w/4GB RAM and a SATA I controller that limits my top read speeds. I went from a 120GB mechanical drive to a 120GB OCZ Agility SSD (Indilinx controller). After POST, XP boots to a usable, non-hourglassing desktop in 10s. PS CS2 starts in about 3sec (it appears most of that time is spent accessing the CPU). Visual Web Dev Express starts in 1s (used to be 30 or more). Firefox starts from cold in about 1s. MS Office apps start as if they were already in memory. The performance this drive offers is just stupid. Another thing - I used to get huge delays in visual studio while it accessed the HDD, doing who knows what -- on the order of minutes sometimes. Not anymore. So --- will there be faster & cheaper drives in the future? Of course. Will you buy an SSD today and tomorrow be sorry? Not a chance (unless you buy one with a jMicron controller). The difference between the slowest "good" SSD and the fastest mechanical drives is HUGE. The difference between the slowest "good" SSD and the fastest is minor. We're already pushing the limits of the SATA II interface, until that's fixed there won't be many huge differences in "good" SSD performance. If you're on a laptop the change is a complete no-brainer, there is no other way to even approach this level of performance. If you're working on a desktop, you can RAID some Raptors together to get great speeds, but you still won't get the latency numbers an SSD can provide which make a big difference if you're dealing with a lot of smallish random accessed files. SSD prices peaked up a bit a couple months ago - prices have been trickling back down to "normal" levels though lately and now is not a bad time to be buying. I bought my 120GB OCZ for about $270 - it peaked afterwards for about $450 - it's been bouncing around between $300~$360 lately - if you can get by with 80gb, the Intel @ ~$225 is a much better deal.

That's actually the perfect reasoning for removing all those other programs and installing winamp. FWIW, I like the Sansa. I haven't used the specific models you posted in your original message, but I have a Creative Zen V+ & a Sansa Clip, and have owned or used other players in the past. So far the Sansa Clip is my favorite as far as it's flexibility, ease of use, and overall look/feel. Not much of an ipod fan, myself. Another nice thing about the Sansa is that it does not require any software to be installed on the computer (drag and drop functionality in explorer) and playlists & organization can be managed from a media player application like WMP or, if you're not fond of frustration & suffering that WMP can provide, winamp.

One thing to consider, especially with forums is that the two leading commercial PHP forum software packages out there are very mature. Much more mature than any forum software I've seen done in classic ASP or ASP.NET.