i recently acquired a DDA-3000 Disk driver analyzer, which - i think - is the same as the Lecroy WavePro 7300a Scope.
Congratulations, nice scope. Yes, the DDA3000 is pretty similar to the WavePro 7300A (aside from a few front panel buttons).
To fasten boot time, i thought about replacing the Hard disk with a IDE SSD.
Good idea, however I'd go for a SATA SSD as the intel board in these scopes also have SATA ports. I have a 240GB intel SSD 530 in my WP7300A.
Think a bit further, it might also be a good idea to upgrade the mainboard itself - there's a Pentium 4 Mainboard in there, with 4 PCI slots. I think upgrading it to a 2/4 core Socket 775 Board would be possible, but i don't know whether Lecroy modified that mainboard (like Tektronix for example does with their TDS6/7/8000 scopes). Anyone ever tried that?
The mainboard is a standard mainboard but forget it, replacing it with a multi-core board will not work for two simple reasons:
1. The scope's display is connected via DVO bus to a DVO-to-AGP adapter card which converts the output from the intel chipset graphics into DVO for the display. This card will not work with any other chipset than the i865G, and is unlikely to work with any other mainboard than the intel D865GLC due to the lack of support for the adapter card in the BIOS.
2. Even if you somehow manage to upgrade the mainboard, as soon as the OS sees multiple virtual (HypterThreading) or real CPU cores WinXP will switch to the SMP kernel and the scope's hardware drivers will start acting funny and render the scope unusable. The drivers for the WavePro7k (and DDA and SDA descendants) do not work with the SMP kernel of XP, which means no multi-core CPU and no HyperThreading.
What you can do is to upgrade the CPU with a faster one. The WavePro/DDA is an X-Stream scope, i.e. it very much relies on the CPU's L2 cache. Upgrade the BIOS of the intel D865GLC mainboard with the last one from the intel site, upgrade RAM to 2GB or 3GB and get a fast Pentium4 processor with 800MHz FSB and 1MB or 2MB L2 cache that is supported by the revision of the mainboard in your scope (intel has compatibility lists somewhere).
Just make sure you do not enable HyperThreading as this means you have to re-install Windows or manually fiddle the uniprocessor kernel back in place as disabling HT will not make the driver problems go away.
Also, make sure you download the latest X-Stream software for your scope from the LeCroy website.