I beta tested Windows 7 too and really liked it compared to XP. I would consider the upgrade for any computer I owned, but not for my wife. She's more of a creature of habit and probably wouldn't appreciate the improvements. She'd just be annoyed with the change.
I ended up getting impatient in the interim and built a system on Vista x64, so I'm a bit leery of running an upgrade to Windows 7 just because an upgrade never seems to be as reliable as a clean OS install, and I'm not willing to do that at this point because the pain of reinstalling everything would be too time-consuming.
Regarding SSD & Windows 7, to the OP, if it's just the idea/cool/geek factor of SSD that you like, more power to you and you have my envy. If you're really looking for huge and noticeable performance boots in everyday tasks, I'm not convinced from everything that I've read that it really will deliver a huge difference versus the extra cost you pay for the disk, even with Win 7's enhanced focus on SSD devices.
Obviously, that's just my opinion, but when I built my system ~6 months ago, I could not justify the price premium. Though maybe a lot has changed in 6 months. I haven't kept up with it as much since then.
I ended up with an Intel i7 920 (2.66 ghz, running stock), MSI X58 Platinum SLI LGA 1366 mobo, 4x1TB HDD, 6GB Patriot DDR3 1600, GIGABYTE GV-R485MC-1GI for the graphics card. I also picked up a combo Blu-Ray/HD combo drive from LG as it was very cheap at the time.
The graphics card I chose because it was one of the few (only?) reasonably capable cards that was fanless, and my primary requirement was silence vs. major gaming performance since I use it primarily for office/video editing rather than for major gaming.
Incidentally, I've recently started ripping Blu-Ray disks and streaming them to my PS3 from my hard drive over the network (using Twonky). I am still amazed that I can stream those videos with absolutely no distinguishable difference from the original disks. The rips do take up a lot of space (15-25 GB / movie), but for having your favorite movies at your fingertips without the need to insert disks, it's very cool.
Jason
