As an alternative, run ubuntu 24/7 with folding smp in the background. If the missus shows interest in using the computer, fire up a copy of xp within virtualbox (full screen, taskbar hidden) and she won't know the difference, and it'll keep folding. Unless she holds right control and hits f anyway. Dual boot for cad/3D games.
I run ubuntu all the time with windows in virtualbox full screen on a second monitor, just mouse over to move between them. CAD + virtualbox is painful, so I reboot to a copy of vista 64 (12gb ram => xp would be silly) when I want to use cad. A bit obsessive, but vista doesn't have internet access (ethernet driver absent), so it doesn't run firewall/antivirus, doesn't fill up with misc crap from the internet and generally runs far cleaner than any internet facing copy of windows I've used.
On topic, I ran it from a vertex for a while, noticed no change in ppd. May have not been paying attention though.
Semi ontopic, the directories /tmp, /var/log, /var/tmp are the ones written to most often under linux (might be lynched for this generalisation). If you don't care about logs/back them up before rebooting, you can put these into a ramdisk by writing three lines of code in /etc/fstab. /tmp in ramdisk is always good. The majority of writes made by ubuntu then go into ram, significantly reducing the number of writes made to the ssd. Good for lifespan. More importantly, because ssds tend to struggle with loads of little writes, moving all of these into ram leaves the drive free to read and write more exciting things, and the entire system runs much faster. Posting from an atom based netbook with a vertex in, when it has ubuntu running the little thing flies. Shame I broke the network manager.
Put this in /etc/fstab, tmpfs defaults to half your ram in size but you can change this if you wish. I think its size=6G etc. under options
Code:
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=0755 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
Warning: this will cause some packages to fail mysteriously when they cannot access the log directories that were installed with the packages and then disappeared at reboot. To rebuild the directory structure inside /var/log on each reboot,
add these lines to /etc/rc.local above the 'exit 0' line:
for dir in apparmor apt cups dist-upgrade fsck gdm installer news samba unattended-upgrades ; do
mkdir -p /var/log/$dir
done
so having a think on the whol ssd thing.