Sean Lange (5/16/2013)
One suggestion, since you are now on 2008 can you change the datatype of your text column to varchar(max)? That will likely help your query because it won't have to convert each and every row.
To add to what Sean has stated, you might want to move not to varchar(max) for text ntext and Image datatypes since they will be deprecated in future versions of SQL Server. Simply stated if you change it now while you are looking at it later when you move up to a newer version of SQL Server you will not have to change it.
You can find documentation on this on the following page - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143729.aspx
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!