Windows 8 on a 5-Year-Old Laptop

After I returned the new Windows 8 laptop to the store, I ordered a new  Seagate Momentus Hybrid SSD 750GB (as I mentioned in a previous post).  I installed it last Friday on my five-year-old HP Pavillion laptop and, over the past few days, have been re-building the laptop.  It's got 4GB of RAM, an AMC Turion 64x2 processor running at 1.90 GHz, and now a 750GB hybrid hard drive.  I did a clean install of Windows 8 Pro.  Initial impressions?  Pretty impressive.  The laptop now boots from cold to fully functional in about 30 seconds.  (We'll see how well this works after I load it up with lots of apps, but so-far-so-good.)  It generally seems more responsive, actually much more responsive, than it did before.  How much of that is due to the new drive vs. getting rid of a bunch of crap that seems to accumulate over a period of years?  Hard to say, but, like I said, the computer seems to be running much faster than before.  I did have a couple problems, as you might expect, with drivers.  I had to install a Windows 7 driver for the video card, but it seems to be working fine.  More to come...