I recently upgraded my thinkpad x32 to an ssd drive from transcend. This upgrade has inproved some operations like boot and close down but some things are still really slow. I am using linux mint 10 and does some photoediting in bibble 5 and digikam and the photos are pretty slow to save. My cpu shows 100 % and the memory usage is high ? I only have 1 gb of ram maybe it is this that is the bottleneck?Should an upgrade to 2 gb do any differnce or is the 1.8 ghz processor just to slow? Should an memory upgrade affect the cpu usage or are the cpu and the ram indepent of each other? Thanks in advance!

Updating to 2GB will improve the speed quite a bit.
You'd need to get a new motherboard (CPU is soldered) for a faster CPU. Not worth it.
You should also check for SSD settings that improve performance.
Don't know if the Linux community is 'up to speed' there.
W7 might be faster than your Mint.

If your SSD is MLC that could be a part of the problem.

Secondly, antiquated GPU on X31/2 is barely up to any task these days apart from the most basic ones.

The ssd drive is an mlc. I think the x32 is pretty ok for alot of things but maybe video/photoediting is to heavy.

Go grab some ram asap, I don't know what resolution your pics are but 1.8Ghz should be fine; graphic editing programs fill ram quite fast then uses swap, so you need to max out your ram space, then check your ssd config, if it's healthy swap will be fast if not it could be hell.

Video editing without hardware support is always a pain.

Try another distro, like arch, it's compiled for 686 architecture and usually snapier,
if you use kde or gnome in Mint maybe you can try Xfce, it's a minimalist desktop that uses little memory.

my 2 cents

There are two version of the Transcend MLC SSD. The later version is much faster, red and black lettering on a silver label without any graphics.

Thanks for your opinons! I think I have the older slower version of the ssd drive. It was really cheap. I should upgrade the ram to 2 gb asap and se if It makes any difference. I have tried to edit pretty big raw and tiff files from a 14 mpix camera. When I do that the computer is painfully slow, it takes rather long time to save the files. This is a pitty coz otherwise i think the x32 is a good computer.

If i dont see any improvments with more ram Iḿ thinking of trying other lighter distros like opensuse 11.3 lxde for example.

Of course it's slow, you're trying to edit massive RAW files on a 6-year-old computer. The CPU and GPU simply aren't up to the task. Use this little laptop for what it's good at (email, word processing, browsing...) and leave the heavy stuff to your main computer.

I'm running the faster Transcend MLC SSD in my X31, with Ubuntu 10.10. Compared with the mechanical drive, it feels a lot faster. I've got 1.25GB RAM fitted, rarely run into problems. Since I've got used to the performance of the revitalised X31, I keep fiddling with my X23 to work out why it's running so slow all of a sudden

There is a lot of tuning information available for Linux & SSD's, and to be honest it looked more convincing than the options available for XP - and I'm an MCSE of that vintage so not afraid of the steps involved.

Interesting performance benchmarks on the Transcend MLC SSD here, and I bookmarked this guide on optimising SSD performance (but of course there's other stuff specific to the netbook in question).

Neither the X31 or the X23 are a patch on my modern dual-core desktop for grunt, either in processor or video controller stakes, but the X31 certainly is fine for image editing, modern software, and a lot more than just emails I wouldn't expect good results with HD video editing on it though.

Now is my x32 ugraded to 2 gb of ram and i runs pretty good, i also changed the os to xubuntu 10.10. Photoediting is still pretty slow. It takes about 10 seconds to save a processed raw file to tiff i bibble 5.2. As i mentioned before, the little computer is great for a lot of things but i think that rawphotoediting demands dualcore.