I essentially will be surfing the net, playing football manager, editing photos in photoshop and general uni work Can anybody tell me if purchasing this would make a big difference to my laptop speeds?
For photoshop, yes. For everything else, no. You'll see faster launch times of your apps and boot times if you restart or shut down, but the true benefit will be with photoshop imho.
When you get the SSD and you decide that it's not as fast as you had thought, I can take it off your hands