Boot time went from over 60s to 23s according to Wise Care (though I saw the desktop much sooner). I didn't even have to remove the old drive- I just rebooted, hit F8 to change the boot device, and here I am. I will remove it for the next step just to make sure, but since i made it this far that shouldn't be a problem. Then, format and spend hours copy back all the files that took hours and hours to move to the external drive in the first place.