Yes the SSD will work fine in a desktop machine. As long as the motherboard is new enough to have SATA connections, you won't have a problem.
Still, this is not the first move I'd make to improve the performance of the machine. It may be more hassle than it's worth.
- 16GB is small...It'll work for a system drive to run the OS but it's too small to hold additional programs and applications. Remember you always need some free space breathing room for swap and temporary files.
- About the only thing I'd use a 16GB drive for is OS swap and Photoshop swap files. That's it. Maybe a replacement netbook drive.
- You are likely to get better performance increases (and save yourself a ton of re-installation time) by clearing out bloatware and startup items. Then defrag (but don't defrag an SSD).
why not? what's so special about an ssd ? – ageis23 – 2011-06-04T00:32:38.383
Defragmenting a disk reorganizes files in sequential order for faster mechanical reads. Since SSDs have such fast random access times, file ordering on the drive doesn't matter. Worse: the act of defragmenting and moving all the data around just wears the memory cells. read more
– JCotton – 2011-06-04T03:03:27.693