Well, my new SSD arrived today, a day early. Thank you eBuyer. I fitted it, started up and Windows informed me it had installed the device drivers for the new hardware. So I started up Explorer, and no sign of it. I then remembered the old saying, "when in doubt, read the manual". So I did. Learned that OCZ SSDs come unformatted. I have a freeware Partition Manager utility, so I fired her up and found I had to create a partition and then format, which I did. The manual had said R-click the drive and Quick Format. This is wrong, as the drive wasn't recognised by Windows until after the format. Anyway, all well.
I then copied my install of TS2009 to the new drive, and after Windows had done it's thing of calculating and calculating, it copied it over. It started at a massive 71MBs/sec which quite rapidly fell to single figures, so it took an hour instead of the initial, optimistic 7 minutes. I have to thank Shaneturner here for his "trainzprotocolchanger" utility which I used next. I also found that in the copying all the exe files had lost their "Run as administrator" property, so I reset that. Then I set The "Open with" for PEVs tools, and called that good.
Now, a slight problem, and I hope my experience will help anyone else who encounters this. I started Trainz, checked everything on the opening screen, went into Content Manager, and tried a DL, any old DL. All well. I still don't know what made me do this, but I'm glad I did. I opened the new DL for Edit in explorer, opened the config.txt, and changed the Username. It would not let me save, "Access Denied". I sat and puzzled for a while, and finally the brain cell kick-started belatedly and sluggishly into function mode. I recalled seeing a thread in the forums about this very thing. I found it and it pointed me to Shane's other invaluable utility "runasadministrator". I DL'd this, and when it tried to run, I closed it, R-clicked, "Run as administrator" and left it running. It takes it's time, it has a lot to do! If you're doing this, and have doubts whether it's stalled, open Task Manager and check the processes tab. If CPU and Memory use are greater than zero for the process, it's working. Leave it running, it gets there. Take a bow, Shane.
So, after all that, if anyone out there is thinking about getting an SSD for Trainz, go for it. I tried out my route, and it is so smooth in running, loads faster, and is an all-round better experience.
So, thanks to everyone who helped and advised me on this thread, and thanks to Shane, without who I would have been a bit lost.
Ken
