Charles,

On my Thinkpad if you press F12 during startup you can select the boot device from a list of those available.

The other big performance increase I got was with large PST files (1Gb+) and Outlook. By locating these on the SSD drive searching within Outlook became usable rather than an excuse to get a coffee. Again though I would reiterate the need to be sure of your backup strategies,

regards Andy