I bought this old laptop in 2006, and just recently it had begun to slow down in a major way. It had a meager 1gb ram, and paging to the 5400rpm hard drive (that was getting awfully full) had me waiting in frustration most of the time.
Adding more ram by itself would have been a big boost, but while I was at it, I thought I'd splurge a bit.
The 4gb ram is some no name cheap set of 2x2gb sticks. From my perusings, this laptop will run 4gb just fine (yes, you lose about 770mb because of chipset limitations, that 64 bit OS does not remedy), and the only ram to avoid seems to be kingston value ram.
I also got a pretty nice deal on a Mushkin chronos deluxe 240gb SSD that plugs right in, and works out of the box.
Installing windows 8.1 on a clean drive took about 15 minutes. The only drivers that needed a little attention were the touch pad, and the ricoh driver.
The ATI x1300 was a little harder, but after modding 10.2 catalyst drivers with mobility modder, it is all done.
Boot time from pressing the power button is 14 seconds, and that includes logging in with a password (automatically though)
I find it hard to believe that my almost 8 year old laptop is now running as a modern machine.