I have a Lenovo U330 with a 2GHz dual core processor, 3GB DDR3, and slow as molasses 250GB hard drive. I got fed up with the slow startup, application load, etc. It's even worse when the laptop needs to update itself. So I tossed the hard drive in favor of a 64GB Crucial (economical SSD for homework, music, and web surfing) and installed Win7. Goodness the laptop performs as well as a desktop now.
Since you do some photo editing and whatnot, you might want to opt for an Intel SSD.
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