I did have to do the firmware update on both of mine. It was a pretty straight-forward process, well documented on OCZ's website/forums. I think it took about 4-5 minutes each. As for Windows tweaks, I'm using the Windows 7 RC, so I didn't really have to do much at all. Just disable the auto-defrag (pretty sure 7 did this by itself, but I wanted to make sure it was off), hibernation, and virtual memory. The one more involved thing I ended up having to do was moving my FireFox profile and cache onto a RAMdisk, as I detailed here. I had constant pausing problems, but only with FF, not with everything like has been mentioned for SSDs using the JMicron controller. Now that I have stuff moved over (profile made the biggest difference), FF is crazy fast and snappy, and it never pauses anymore