The SSD really does make a huge difference. Everyday tasks like waking from sleep, opening applications, even scrolling complicated pages in Safari seems much much improved. The ram helps too, for sure, probably with the Safari beach balls.
I may end up throwing Lion on it though. I've encountered two nasty bugs in the latest version of Snow Leopard:
- When the bots around the internet even attempt to connect to the iMac over its VNC port (which I use for remote management) the screen comes on. SL seemingly does not wait for the attempt to actually be authenticated before turning the display on (from sleep or screen saver). Very strange design choice and I don't think Lion is like this.
- Time Machine backups are unbearably, frustratingly slow. It took 8 hours to back up 1.2 megabytes yesterday. I googled it and it seems to be a known issue on 10.6.7 and 10.6.8 which renders the Time Capsule nearly useless. The solution for these people was to upgrade to Lion.