Recently I bought a SSD for my laptop, and after upgrading it feels really fast. Earlier Windows 8.1 used to boot to desktop in about ~100 seconds (5400 RPM HDD) and now it has been reduced to ~6 seconds!!
With SSD quite a few of the Windows optimizations are not required- namely search indexing, superfetch and prefetch. Actually disabling these might increase SSD lifetime- as they reduce un-neccessary writes to SSD.
Search Indexing was added to compensate for HDD lag while accessing commonly used files. It did has profound effect when I was using 5400 RPM HDD but with SSD no one needs it.
To disable Search Indexing:
- Search services.msc in start menu and run as admin
- Locate Windows Search service and disable it
- Search Indexing Options in start menu
- Disable indexing for directories on SSD
Superfetch is designed to boot faster and launch the most commonly used applications launch faster. See this article by Mark Russinovich for details.
To disable superfetch and prefetch:
- Search services.msc in start menu and run as admin
- Locate superfetch service and disable it
- Run regedit.exe as admin
- Locate HKLM \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management \ PrefetchParameters and change the EnablePrefetcher keys value to 0. Some details here
Other thing worth tyring is disabling pagefile, I know this is risky but if you have enough ram give it a shot :).