Windows 7 installation

[Tigger29]

Could also be the power supply but first try reseating the video card and make sure all the power connections are secure.  Maybe you knocked something loose in the process of replacing the hard drive?

[MADe]

I used the GTX 260 with the last of the 19x.xxx and the 215.75 beta drivers with no issues. There was something bad about the 197.45???? drivers.
The 275 series drivers are really for later cards. I use 275.33 for GTX 550 TI's. The 260 cards are around 5 years old now. Maybe its going bad.
I used 2 260's in SLI, great cards. I upgraded to the 550 TI's, a pair of them, were same cost as one 260, prices are down. 550's use only 1 onboard plug, smaller in physical size bt a lot and more onboard ram.

Him the W7 install should have disabled indexing on the SSD, as well as a scheduled defrag. You do not defrag an SSD. Make sure its not scheduled in the defragment scheduler. I say disable it but you planned on adding spin drives to build, they can use defragging.TRIM is for SSD maintenance or some use log off time for SSD maintenance.
Go into device manager for drive and enable write cacheing under the policies tab.
It will get better with usage.

[Greebo]

The video card is more likely than the PSU (700W Seasonic) I think. A few years back I had a video memory issue where this card would freeze briefly then swap all the textures around in AH. You'd be flying around with dashboard instruments etc. draped all over the landscape. Lowering the clock settings on the video card fixed this. I thought the current issue was the drivers because the problem exactly coincided with me changing the OS. However now I come to think of it, the new installation may well have increased the video card's clock settings back to default. I'll install a utility and try dropping them again.

I've made sure trim, defrag, write cacheing etc. is all set up, and other stuff I read in SSD/Win 7 set up guides. There was a tick box on the C: SSD drive's properties: "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed....." that I disabled. I thought it had fixed the slow desktop problem at first, but it hasn't gone away after all. Occasionally you click on a button or an icon and nothing happens for ages. While you are waiting you can move the mouse and click on buttons but none of them works until the window or program you originally clicked on opens.

[MADe]

Whats the event viewer saying, any errors, associated with known issue?

Consider disabling superfetch and prefetch.????????????
You let W7 handle install? ie alignment of drive.
You left a pagefile on SSD boot?
Some would disable system restore.??????????????? I have done this because a repair install is just to easy. I was forced to this becuase of bad MS updates.

You should not be waiting on the SSD. Its plug in the SATA port 0? Mobo in AHCI mode?

As time progresses the TRIM and/or GC(Garbage Collection) in SSD firmware will help with performance. Also an SSD is only as good as the system cpu. I have a 30GB SSD boot with several spinners, all IDE. Its not a speed demon, but only the OS, XP Pro/32 is on the SSD with a Core2 DUO 6400.
Most apps are on a spin drive. Slow down write there. Overall tho its a good combo, no issues. This is what you had been considering.
Not a 24/7 machine. Use it for low level editing and storage, in my case.

I just remember this, 275.33 drivers come with 3D drivers for 3D TV. Only install the drivers and physX, not any 3D, Nvidia sound, or auto update stuff.

[Greebo]

Lowering the clock speed of the memory on the video card seems to have fixed the graphics glitches in AH, at least it did not do it in two flights last night.

The slow desktop performance persists though. I have disabled pre and superfetch, left a small pagefile on the SSD and I enabled AHCI on the BIOS and OS. The SSD is in port 0. I haven't disabled system restore yet, I wanted to get everything loaded and stable first. I'm not sure about what features the video drivers installed though.

One symptom of this is a long pause between the desktop loading and being able to open any program or menu. It takes over a minute between clicking on the start menu and the menu opening. After that things generally work fine, but occasionally there is another, usually shorter pause when clicking on something.

Event viewer listed three persistent errors:

There is an item (event 6) regarding Windows turning off power management features that occurs on every start up, but before the initial password pause and the desktop loads. This is down to my old MB not supporting the latest power saving features of in 7 and there's nothing I can do about it as there is no up to date bios for it.

There was another item (event 10) that turned out to be an MS bug related to SP1. This coincided with the start menu finally opening after the desktop first loaded. However fixing the problem with an MS fix stopped the messages but didn't fix the lag.

Finally there was a persistent message about the wireless driver saying it had shut down successfully. As i don't use wireless I just disabled the service to stop the messages. No help with the lag though.

I've spent most of the week experimentally disabling services, eye candy and security stuff, running scans and trawling through Windows forums to no avail.

I may have to live with it for now I think. I need to get on with actually using the computer for a while rather than trying to fix it. Thank you for all the suggestions though guys.