After reading and hearing everyone raving about SSDs for a couple of years it was hard to resists the upgrade.

So I got an Intel SSD 510 120GB to replace my Seagate 2.5" laptop HDD.

The prices in the ~120GB SSD category are pretty close. I chose the Intel based on reading that they have a low failure rate (I was unable to find the soruce when writing this up).

The Thinkpad X61 only has SATA-II; the drive supposedly has better performance on SATA3.

UPDATE: Samat K Jain points out that “the ThinkPad X61 is limited to 1.5 Gbps, even with SATA-II (Lenovo’s excuse: power saving, by keeping bus clocks down)”. Lots of discussion about that on the net.

The Linksys WRT54G (and WRT54GS) make for very nice firewall since you can install any (Linux) software you wish on them. The platform consists of a MIPS processor running at 200MHz, 16M (or 24M) of RAM, and 4M (or 8M) of flash.

Here are some articles:

• The Little Engine That Could by Robert X. Cringely
• Hacking the Linksys WRT54G - a slashdot article

Here are more technical links:

• LinksysWrt54g at SeattleWireless
• WRT54G - LinkSys site
• Linux on the WRT54G