I don't think Chris has to be bothered by TRIM support for his uses Even depending upon churn of data to the SSD, a manual TRIM on occasion is easy enough if really needed. Agreed tho that for many older computers now, an SSD gives more performance bang for buck than more ram/CPU/GPU upgrades now, it's awesome what SSD has done for the longevity of some equipment now.
A little bit of a misnomer, it all depends on the IO profile of the workload, I agree for random read/write generally SSD is faster than anything else consumer made. Massive sequential read/write the differences between 7.2k/10k drives and SSD is not worth it from a £:Gb perspective. Also depends upon the blocksize of the read/write too. Also too some SSD can be bottlenecked by the drive interface - hence PCIe flash cards (also watch what fusion IO are trying to do).
A possiblity, but he's then using an SSD to install W7 on, then an install of XP in a VM inside of that, even with a TinyXP install, it's still a waste of space *if* W7 isn't going to be used for anything and I imagine that this laptop will be sat in Chris' garage, not connected to the net so security latest & greatest probably aren't a concern, or things like closed memory spaces etc like W7 has for security.
I think the motorsport apps Chris uses are quite bespoke and unfortunately apps within that category take ages to transition to more modern OS support, for instance look at some of the ECUs which still use a parallel/serial cable to program with! Even most switch kit has expired that and moved to USB.