I have a zif version of your Kingspec link posted above and it is pata also.

It will run faster and better than a platter drive. At least mine does compared to the 4200 rpm ones that I could only get for mine because of zif interface.

I can't answer that. I run mine as ext3 and seperate / , /home partitions with no swap on 2 gig of ram on my atom n270 netbook.

I have a Latitude D420 that I put an SSD in and it didn't make that big of a speed difference. My guess is that my day to day use doesn't hit disk all that much.

I'm wondering if one of the socket's that the ram sits in could be bad? I scavenged a 1 gb stick of 5300 from another laptop and tried plugging it into the socket on the bottom of the laptop and the lights just flashed and nothing happened. I tried several other sticks that I had laying around and they didn't work either. I then took that first stick and put it in the socket underneath the keyboard and now I have 1 gb of ram now. Tried several of the others in the other socket and still didn't work.

I have a 2gb stick of 5300 ram, could that work in this? Not that I'm complaining either way. This laptop runs awesomely with 1gb of ram. It looks like it takes a max of 2gb so I was just wondering if one 2gb stick would work instead of two 1gb sticks?