HP put decent stuff in there to begin with.
The HD is on rubber "boots"to keep it quiet, the only advantage of SSD is power consumption and heat. If anything I would step up to terabytes for storage space, better reliability and lower power consumption.
The vid card is the weak point, do a search for popular replacements and consider swapping that, and maybe the case fans with something more efficient and quieter.
Next, max out the RAM. Blue-Ray is personal choice, but entirely appropriate and posses no problems.
Liek others have said, look to Vista driver for front panel and apparently you will have to replace the wireless card (no driver).
Good luck and post how things go.
Just installed (or did custom upgrade) of my Hp Z558 with Win7 Home, and it was much more painless than ANY previous version. The only thing that didn't work out of the box is the front panel display. After instaling the Vista driver, all is well. Even the wireless card works. I will look to install updated Nvidia drivers after a bit, but all in all, it works fine.
I will say the fans run a little more under Win7, but not enough to make me do anything about it. The new Media Center looks much slicker then 2005, but I can see the core is still the same.
Heybiff
hey_biff The HD is on rubber "boots"to keep it quiet, the only advantage of SSD is power consumption and heat. If anything I would step up to terabytes for storage space, better reliability and lower power consumption.
You forgot one very important advantage to a SSD besides power consumption and heat....SPEED! Windows 7 is built for SSD, it runs much quicker, boots up faster, shuts down lightning quick and recovers from sleep in a blink of an eye.
I currently have the z545 that I purchased in December 2004 with everything upgraded excluding the processor the power supply was replaced after a failure of the OG power supply, but purchase 2 at the time for backup.
I just order a new P4 d 650 to install soon as too information on this website
Memory 2gb, I will probably upgrade this to 4GB but did the 2GB many years ago when HP said that is all that it would see.
Graphics card JATON Video-PX8400GS_EX GeForce 8400 GS 512MB
An additional Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q TV Tuner Stick/Hybrid, for 3 tuners total
Patriot Xporter XT Boost 4GB Flash Drive as boost drive
LG Black 6X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 6X BD-ROM 4MB Cache SATA Internal Blu-ray Burner Super Multi Blu-ray Disc Burner & HD DVD-ROM Drive Model GGW-H20L LightScribe Support with a SABRENT SBT-STDB IDE Ultra ATA-100/133 to SATA Port Mini Converter (the second SATA connection caused me problems with booting and other options so I just hooked it up to the PATA controller)
2 x Linksys DMA2100 extenders and 2 x Linksys DMA 2200.
Now for the interesting stuff,
I have 5 PROAVIO S4FR RAID-5 enclosures. (http://www.proavio.com/s4fr.html)
One is connected to the motherboard and I am using it as the boot drive, the others are hook to a SATA300 TX4 (I removed the wireless card, because I really never use it, cables are routed through the original panel the held the Harddrive)
I did this mostly because I wanted the OS to be on a RAID controller and I had Hard Drive over heating issues that was causing premature failure of the drive the original 200 gb failed within a month, replaced with a 320gb, then 400gb, 500gb, and 1TB before swapping to the array.
I upgrade from 2005 to vista without many issues ran great for about 6 months but currently having some issues with windows Media player crashing the system.
Plan on doing a clean install to windows 7 ultimate soon.