A135-S2326 CPU, SSD, and OS upgrade

Question

Just putting this out there... A friend of mine has one of these laptops but she never really used it because it was a slug. About a year ago I upgraded this laptop from Vista to 7pro. There are no missing drivers. They were all available either within 7pro, Windows Update, or from Toshiba's website. Then I flashed the bios to the latest available from Toshiba (ver 1.60). I had to create a bootable CD with the flash utility on it. I used Nero 7 for that. The laptop will beep alot during the flash process and then it will just abruptly shut down making you think something went wrong. But after you power back on your heart rate will return to normal. Then about a week ago I upgraded the hard drive to an Intel SSD - model X25-M with 80Gb capacity. It was a used OEM drive from eBay for about $30. I used Macrium Reflect free edition to clone the 7pro OS onto it using a USB port with a 'Cables To Go' USB to ide/sata hard drive adapter just like the one here:  http://www.cablestogo.com/product/30504/33in-usb-2.0-to-ide-or-serial-ata-drive-adapter-cable Make sure 7pro is updated before installing Macrium Reflect Free because a recent windows update broke Macrium on all of my machines. Macrium would finish the clone process just fine but the cloned drive would not boot. A reinstall of Macrium fixed the problem. The SSD was a huge improvement, especially in boot up time. Transfer rates were low for this SSD (checked with Crystal Disk Mark) due to the SATA I connection of the motherboard but the quick seek times still made launching programs much, much faster. But the single core Celeron 520M at 1.6Ghz had to go. When .NET framework is 'optimizing' after an update and using 100% CPU, you can't do jack sh*t else until it finishes. A little research showed that a Core 2 Duo T5300 at 1.73Ghz was compatible with the chipset (ATI Radeon Xpress 200M) on this board. I just didn't know if the bios would support the CPU. I decided to go for it. I bought a T5300 used on eBay for about $5. The hardest part of the CPU upgrade was taking the laptop apart and keeping track of all the screws - there are 3 different lengths. It will help alot to remember which length came from which hole. I had one short screw left over when I was done and I could not find where it belonged even after taking it back apart several times. I found a YouTube vid on taking this thing apart. I used some Ceramique thermal compound on the CPU and heatsink. The bios offers no info or settings whatsoever for the CPU but 7pro recognized it just fine. I noticed that the power saving features in Win7 and Intel Speedstep were working too, as the CPU would throttle back it's frequency during low CPU demand. When I set minimum CPU to 100% while plugged in it stayed at 1.73Ghz all the time. I used the All CPU Meter gadget to monitor this. CPU temps never got out of hand even while running Prime 95 CPU stress test. You will still be limited to 2Gb max memory and the graphics cannot be upgraded but the laptop literally feels like a few generations newer now. Oh yeah... had to buy a new battery, too...

Answer 1

since the motherboard only supports 2Gb of memory 32 bit 7pro will be just fine.
Exactly. For anybody reading this, here are the disadvantages of 64-bit Windows.
It cannot run any 16-bit applications. That includes all DOS applications. It cannot even install 32-bit applications that have 16-bit installation packages.
In order to run 32-bit programs, 64-bit Windows needs to emulate the 32-bit environment and run the programs there. So it runs most everything slower - not faster. Usually, you won't notice the slow down. See KB906892 for an extreme example. Eventually, there will be 64-bit applications. But for now they are rare.
Many older peripherals have only 32-bit drivers.