I picked one of these up at Circuit City last week and am looking to speed it up where ever possible.  (Reviewed below).

It has a normal SATA II drive in it and I know an SSD drive would significantly speed it up, but don't want to spend any more $ on it. 

http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/review/2008/05/08/OCZ-64GB-SATA-II-SSD/p5  has pretty graphs to compare.

I weaseled a RAM upgrade out of my hard ware guy so I have 1.5gigs in it now (max'd).

I ran speed tests between booting off the SATA II drive and the same install via USB 2.0 thumb drive and boot times were around 50 seconds for either.

I know there are SSD ExpressCards for cheap (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820191057) but I read that the ExpressCards are really just USB 2.0 speeds anyway so I wouldn't see any difference from my thumb drive test.

Short of compiling my own kernel (which I never can seem to do right), any other advise on how to speed up a netbook's boot time?

I will say once booted, everything runs pretty well, though I'm sure I wouldn't mind more speed then, too!


grazie!
Mike


Review:
Stopped in to Circuit City today and (impulsively?) bought a Lenovo IdeaPad S10.

I've been looking for something to waste my money on/replace the Dell I bought that I ended up not liking and turning over to my wife, so it wasn't extremely impulsive, just a little impulsive.

Anyway, it was 10% of the normal price, which brought it down to $370. Not a great deal at that price since online it is like $350 or so, but the one I got has twice as much RAM and hard drive space as online numbers, plus no shipping.

Specs:
Intel Atom N270 1.6ghz CPU (Intel has returned to multi-threading)
10.2 inch screen
1GIG RAM
160Gig SATA II Hard drive
Wired/Wireless NIC cards
3 Cell Lithium-Ion
2.64lbs
No CDROM (not a big deal as I have a Lenovo USB CDROM drive anyway)

The size: possibly the perfect size...small, light weight without being tiny. 10.2 inch 1024x600 screen and not an impossibly tiny keyboard (though obviously not full sized). It is about the size of a larger hard cover book.

The OS: Comes with Windows XP and it ran very well...applications opened fast, web surfing was responsive and I could open several apps at once without much hit to performance.

After 27 different questions about my loyalty to Bill Gates, I decided it was time to upgrade.

Concerned that the new hardware may have issues with older versions of Linux, I jumped right into an as-yet-to-be released version of Ubuntu (9.04).

Booted right up, answered a couple questions and installed like a champ...saw the disk, the RAM, the wireless card, everything...during the install.

Upon reboot into Linux though, nothing...it just wouldn't boot. "No OS found".

I thought my partitioning might be screwing me up, so I let the installer pick, but to no avail.

I booted off live CD's, but when I mounted and chroot'd into my install, the install didn't even see my /dev/sda.

At one point I finally got to a grub > boot, but still wouldn't boot to the OS.

I tried a Debian 4.0 install, but that didn't see either the wired or wireless nics.

Similar to the Ubuntu, Fedora 10 installed, but would never boot.

So I tried a Ubuntu 8.10 install and everything was fine! Installed with my partitions (/boot, /, /home and swap) and all is well in the world.

Wired, wireless, SATA, screen resolution....everything works straight from the install.

I'm still testing and upgrading but over all this is a great netbook and takes to Ubuntu Linux straight away, and for less than $400 a great addition to my daily commute.