Upgraded my DV5t about as far as I could

I bought a BTO 1st Gen DV5t 2 1/2 years ago, Downgraded it to XP, and it's served me well. I travel once or twice a month, and it's been very useful on road. I often use it for software development, and blu-ray playback on remote displays, along with all the other typical stuff. In short, it became and is my primary daily machine (despite having a i7-980x a home for heavy crunching )

As a software developer in the game industry, I tend to suffer from upgrade-fever a lot - always searching for something better. But sadly, none of the new machines out there offers the perfect feature set from my personal requirements that would make me upgrade (the new Macbook Pros come closest) - size and weight (under 6 pounds), and high screen resolution being two of my biggest needs. So I decided to stick with my DV5t for another 2 years, and put some money into upgrading it.

The result is that I've taken my DV5t about as far I can without getting extreme, and I thought I would (for no particular reason) share my results.

I previously upgraded the optical drive to a Blu-ray burner. I do use it a lot (AnyDVD HD anyone?), but have only burned 1 blu-ray to date.

While replacing the LCD display cable last week, I went ahead and upgraded the CPU to a P9700 - 2.8Ghz, 6MB L2, and 28w TDP. To prep, I upgraded the BIOS from f.11 to f.21. That went smoothly, and I was careful to clean the heatsinks and re-applied Artic Silver 5. The CPU is a nice speed bump from the P8400 but one thing that I now notice is the fan.

I changed the BIOS setting for "Fan always on" to off, which is fine, but when the fan does kick in, it stays on only for a second before turning off again, which makes for a distraction. Is there any software out there that would let me adjust the fan's behavior or turn on/off thresholds?

The other upgrades I did were to bump the RAM to 8GB and replace the 320GB 7200 Rpm HD with an Intel 300GB SSD.

Now I mentioned that I am still running Windows XP on my DV5t, so it may seem like upgrading the RAM is pointless. (An aside - one of the reasons for sticking with XP has been that I've configured it for high physical security with invisible accounts and truecrypt partitions, and i've not yet worked out the equivalent for Windows 7)

Anyway, the RAM upgrade was deliberate because I am able to use it to augment and reduce wear on the SSD - and I wanted to share what I did with others here.

After testing it out, I went ahead and bought Ram disk software that can use the memory above 4GB, and supports putting the system paging file on it. On my DV5t, the Ram disk is 4.9 GB, while retaining 3Gb for Windows.

So I've setup my Page File to use the Ram Disk, as well redirecting the TMP and TEMP environment variables, and all of my browser caches / temporary internet files to the Ram Disk, with the idea that it will significantly reduce the write activity to the SSD, improving performance and lifespan. And it has the added benefit of automatically cleaning my browsing cache every time I reboot.