Microsoft released a utility to create the USB key. You also need nothing beyond what comes on the Win 7 disc to do it. It might not be officially supported, but it works, and you don't need any third party items to do so.

I never had any major issues with the partitioner either. Create the size partition you want for Windows and... *gasp*... it leaves empty space for Linux.

There was only 4 holes that lined up with the case bays on the 3 1/2" SSD adapter. So either it was designed to only use two holes (on the front) or I had it backwards and it actually uses 4 screws (one in each corner; how it is now, except the case screws don't happily agree with the holes).

USB isn't working. I created a USB drive with a Fedora LiveCD and the Windows 7 DVD, but neither will boot. I've never booted from USB before so maybe I'm missing something, but I think the motherboard is set up to do it... If I just let it go then there's no mention and it just fails to find an OS. If I explicitly select my USB key then it fails with:

Invalid system disk
Replace the d☺

I'm guessing that the MBR (or equivalent) isn't set up properly, but I don't know. I used Fedora's livecd-iso-to-disk tool for both... Anybody know how to do it manually?

@BAF: Windows instructions aren't helpful because my old computer is overheating right now. I can barely keep it running at runlevel 3. In other words, I need to do this from a Linux terminal.

You think it is?
Either you set it to boot from a USB disk or you didn't :S
Look for a BIOS setting that enables booting from USB if you have one, and also change the boot priority so the USB disk goes first.

And don't forget to change it afterwards because one day you'd end up accidentally booting from a random USB disk and waste a couple of minutes of your life rebooting and going "guh?"

No, but there are several programs online that do the same thing, maybe you should try them?
I know Ubuntu has a "USB start up disk creator" usb-creator-gtk || usb-creator-kde.

There's also the matter of what disk you are using, when I tried it myself I found hazy information that some disks you can boot from while you can't from others.

...64-bit Windows 7 is 20 GB by itself. I split my SSD in half (~28 GB each) so Windows could use half and Linux could use half to boot faster... Windows is STILL slow to boot (Fedora can boot faster from a disk drive) and it has taken up the entire half for just the OS. I can't install Steam games because there isn't room on the drive. What do I do? Append: I had to uninstall Steam and reinstall it to my HDD so games would be installed there... I guess I'll also have to remember to install everything there instead. I just created "D:\Program Files" and "D:\Program Files (x86)" for consistency...

Uh, if the SSD is slow, you're doing something horribly wrong.

A system should absolutely boot much faster with an ssd. Did you let the windows 7 installer partition the drive for you? it tries to make the first partitioned aligned such that it isn't causing RMW (read+modify+write) cycles when accessing filesystem blocks (makes sure the first filesystem block starts at an erase block boundary).

My desktop starts in about 10s on its Vertex 1 SSD. On a hdd it was up near 20-30 seconds.

His SSD is.

append:

Personally I'd just give the SSD to which ever OS you use the most. And leave the other on the HDD.

If its super thin, its a slim line drive, used in laptops and some mini-itx cases.

If it didn't come with an adapter of any kind (either for the rear data/power connections or mounting hw), you probably want to send it back and order a dekstop DVDRW. Or try and find some mounting hardware for it, and the necessary electrical/data converters as well.

I figured out why Windows is taking up so much space... 8 GB pagefile.sys and 6 GB hyberfil.sys (even though as far as I can tell hybernation is disabled). Brillant! I was able to relocate the paging file to my HDD, but I can't seem to figure out how to do the same with the hybernation file...

That sucks. I really want a slot loading DVD drive.

They exist in desktop form. I have one.

Some games will NOT run without some form of swap file.

*cough* Should have listened to me when I told you to buy the 120GB SSD. *cough*

I remember bringing up exactly this point. Spending hours trying to fit onto the 60GB drive, and not having room left over for the games anyway. The 120GB drive was cheaper per GB as well. Meh.

I get away with a 30GB ssd for my linux installs.

My htpc currently shows:

/dev/sda1 30G 18G 11G 63% /

That's not including /home which lives on a 320GB HDD.

My desktop is similar. Both put linux's / on the SSD by itself, and /home and swap on a HDD.

Real men never turn off their desktops unless it's for an update.

Also, SSDs for games yield huge performance boosts with realtime loading (and, obviously, any loading in general).

I've been told this works:

powercfg -h off

Run it from a command prompt as administrator (i.e., right click, run as admin).

You can adjust the TEMP/TMP environment variables. You could just point them to the hard drive.