I’ve entered the 21st century and replaced the hard drive in my late 2009 27” iMac with a 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD. Changing the drive took about twenty minutes. Trying to get all of the dust out of the iMac’s screen took about an hour and a half and ultimately failed. In the end, it didn’t really matter - I can’t see them during normal operation!

Bootup when reopening all windows is very snappy (after a crash while I was in the middle of some work, this was what annoyed me enough to invest in an SSD) but during normal operation I haven’t noticed any huge benefits - perhaps I’m not doing enough real work :(

The other problem I had was that my Parallels Windows 7 virtual machine began blue screening and wouldn’t boot at all. In the end I had to reinstall it and my applications from scratch.