I quite fancy getting a solid state hard drive for my gaming pc. At the moment i have sata one but i have heard solid state ones are alot quicker at loading textures and increasing fps. Can i keep the one i have with windows 7 on it and just use a solid state one for the games? Is it as simple as plugging it in and installing the games to it?

Nope, that won't work. Watch out, some of the cheaper SSD are not exactly quick. You would really need your OS on a SSD drive to see any improvement in performance, to be honest I would be surprised if you would see any performace improvement, you would probably be better off buying a faster graphics card.

The card i have is pretty good (gtx 460) i thought. I do have a few problems when a lot of things are happening on screen it can get a bit laggy. Was hoping a better harddrive would help this. What would be best, install windows and games fresh onto a solid state and use my current one for everything else?

I've got my OS (win7) on SSD and it definatly made a difference, and still after having endless things installed/removed etc, it still only takes 15 seconds or under to boot up and be ready to use. I have read that this gen of SSD is only good at reading info, not so fast at writing. The next gen will be much improved and then I'll definatly be switching my games/data drive to SSD too

i have 120gb Intel X-25m G2 SSD's in both of my laptops. my Netbook has it as the sole hard drive for everything, and my gaming laptop has it as the OS drive with all my games, and media on a WD scorpio black 7200rpm drive.

They boot into windows very quickly, and any app installed on it loads very quickly.

IMHO... SSD drives are not wise for lots of storage... Might be worth getting a small one (20gb) for your OS... You could use one for paging/virtual memory.... but given the price of RAM these days... you would be better off buying 12gb of DECENT ram and whacking that in your machine.....

replacing the drives in a ps3 for solid state dramatically improves the game load times apparently.

Mate's put one in his machine. He plays on line sometimes and thinks it has vastly improved his machines performance.
It was not a cheapo one though, as he is in the world of IT for a living and was given this to trial.

I bought a SSD recently (OCZ Vertex 2e 90G) , it's screamingly fast compared to the 7200rpm HDD it replaced.
Applications load instantly rather than in 3-4 seconds, which doesn't sound much but makes a huge difference to how fast the machine feels.
They are also completely silent (obviously) which is another good reason to have one IMO. The "big" data that isn't used all the time (photo's and mp3) live on the NAS.

I'll not be going back.

Finally for the OP it's as easy as adding any other disc to the system.

Got a 120GB OCZ vertex 2 with my OS and apps on it. Blisteringly fast - love it. Write speed isn't quite as fast but then who actually does a lot of writing to be honest, if you think about it? Current gen 3 SSDs are crazy fast both read and write but your mobo needs the latest SATA3 to be able to use that speed, plus of course they are much more expensive. I got mine for £120 as I had decided ages ago I'd jump on the bandwagon when they reached £1/GB for a decent one. Dont listen to Tegwin 20GB wont even hold an install of win7! Consider 60GB the minimum for OS and apps etc. 120 is nice.

As for games an SSD will make no difference to your in-game FPS. Load times yes, but a game loads a level and off you go - drive speed has no real effect on FPS during the game. It is quite nice to put the game you're currently playing on the SSD for the improved load times though.

It's not quite as simple as adding a normal drive - you need to change your mobo from IDE to AHCI mode for best performance which can be a pain if you aren't reinstalling windows. But you'll be best off doing a fresh windows install and so can switch to AHCI mode just before that.

They are considerably faster are reading but a lot slower at writing and also much less efficient at using disk space this depends on file size so a 250 GB solid state drive might only only hold the same amount of data as a 125 gb conventional drive if the data was in small files.

i have got a 250gig ssd in my mac book air it boots in 8-9 seconds havent noticed any slow performance issues writing to it. what it does equate to is 9hours battery life no noise and complete silence. i can certainly say its a big performance jump from a conventional hdd

Thanks everyone, loads of advise there. How would i go about using a new ssd and my hdd together. Would i install win 7 to the ssd and the games and then format the old hdd then put all my pictures and docs on that?

yep

Ok next question then. Once i have windows on the new ssd can i just plug in my old formatted hdd and just copy everything onto it from backup disks?

yep but you dont need to bother.

take out the old hdd put the ssd in. install windows and get it all working. then put the old hdd back in on a different sata port then boot up. then you can just delete the old windows directories on the old drive

Cone the old hd on to the new one no messing around with a windows install however the new hd must be the same size or larger than the old one.