Cloning
The fair way to go about testing this was to clone my old hard drive so that everything would be in the same exact place, same software and startup items. If I did a clean install onto the SSD, it would hardly be a controlled experiment. I used a free software called Disk Copy 2.3 by EASEUS to do this. Unlike other cloning programs, this one does a true sector-by-sector copy. The download from their site burns to a bootable CD, which starts up a mini OS that detects all hard disks, including USB and Firewire ones. Since Windows isn't running during the cloning, you won't run into any permissions errors.
Stats
Cold Boot (powering on from the off state up to the logon screen)
45 seconds
Windows Start (logon until all startup items have loaded)
18 seconds
Photoshop CS (Photoshop startup & plugin load)
7 seconds
Conclusion
There you have it... same exact systems on 2 different hard drives. The SSD swap made a significant difference. There wasn't as big a difference with the cold boot, but that's because both tests went through the BIOS sequence, which doesn't occur on the drives. The Windows startup was unbelievably fast... 1 minute and 8 seconds to just 18 seconds!
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