ORIGINAL: Simon Edmonds
I have been thinking of getting a solid state drive. Does anyone know if it makes the bigger scenarios play faster?
A solid state drive will make reading and writing data to storage faster. If you use it for your OS it will make your PC boot faster and will probably make TOAW load up faster in the first place (again provided it's stored on the SSD). However once the game is running you're dependent on your RAM and your processor.
From my own experience, an extra stick of RAM makes quite a bit of difference to performance of an existing machine, and is simple to install even for the enthusiastic amateur. If you're buying something new, then you're going to need to customise your spec a bit because the base models from most vendors just go up on one scale so you either get something underpowered or wind up paying a lot for a video card you don't need (unless you want to play recently made action games, which I don't).