Latitude X1 upgrade

As it stands right now, there is not even one laptop on the market that's as little as mine (netbooks counted out for reasons mentioned before) with such a nice design and very good resolution. In order to get anything even close to the size and battery life I'd have to spend the amount of money I'm not willing to.
To save myself trouble I've actually thought: My little one has really only two weak spots and another one that should be replaced.
1. Really low amount of memory.
2. Very slow disk.

Those two combined mean that during work majority of things are just being paged, cause there's not enough space for them in memory, and because the disk is slow, overall performance is weak.

Thing to replace was ofc the battery, because after 5 years of work it simply is not performing well, keeping the computer up for slightly less than an hour. I've expected really high prices cause usually all Dell components are pricey, but I was pleasantly surprised. There are a couple of merchants selling on ebay, who offer the better, 6-cell, ones for less than 30 quid!

So that left me with memory and disk. I definitely wanted an SSD disk, because of the lack of mechanical elements meaning less battery usage, less heat and SPEED!

And at least 1GB memory (wasn't sure if it was capable of addressing more). As it shown it was.

However somebody else thought about the same thing earlier and offered his insight:

Dell Latitude X1 Upgrade (SSD) @ iamgoat

There he replaced disk with 32GB one and added 16GB memory card I'm planning on using dual boot, so I've chosen a bigger disk (64GB - same brand) and as I already had 32GB Compact Flash card in my inventory I've decided to use it as it is a brilliant idea to extend my box' memory.
Thanks Rick!

Everything I did was pretty much the same as Rick shows it in his gallery, as LX1 is really easy to upgrade, there's really nothing you can break as long as you don't pull too strong and can count (numbered screws on the HDD lid) ;)

Now before doing so I've made a couple of simple tests to check how will my laptop improve.

Because I was testing everything with Windows 7 (trial to check if my computer is able to run it - tat's because I was thinking of maybe selling it - It is and is doing really well). I have several screens from before and after upgrade.

Windows Experience Index before:

Component	Details	Subscore	Base score
Processor	Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.10GHz	2.1	1.0 Determined by lowest subscore
Memory (RAM)	512 MB	2.9
Graphics		1.9
Gaming graphics	Not detected	1.0
Primary hard disk	43GB Free (56GB Total)	3.4

Windows Experience Index after:

Component	Details	Subscore	Base score
Processor	Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.10GHz	2.0	1.0 Determined by lowest subscore
Memory (RAM)	2.25 GB	4.1
Graphics		1.9
Gaming graphics	Not detected	1.0
Primary hard disk	43GB Free (56GB Total)	5.9

Even though due to the poor graph the overall index is still 1.0, that's not the point.
Memory index increased from 2.9 to 4.1
Disk Index increased from 3.4 to 5.9

Would the 0.1 drop in processor index be caused by higher CPU resources consumption needed to run SSD?

Note that both test were made on clean installation of Windows, and almost empty disk, with nothing but bare windows services running in the background.

There's nothing to comment on really. SSD is clearly better. One thing worth noting tho is the temperature. 42-43 degrees on the old disk show that it was really the part of the laptop that cause majority of the heat problems.

It still gets hot, when processor is, but now the temperature is bearable, while before it could get unpleasant.

Next step will be: Partitioning and installing Gentoo.