SSDs are getting faster than SATA can deal with anyway (and googling suggests that your laptop has SATA II, your drive's probably quicker than it can handle). So yeah, getting a slower (relatively) one is smart since you get the same effective performance for less money (unless you're using M.2. or PCIE or something).

Easiest way to scale your CPU back in Mint is to use this.

If you want to get your hands dirtier, then have a read of this.

To dick around with power saving stuff in general in a finegrained way you want a package called laptop mode tools. There's *lots* of stuff to configure (if you want to, like). Good documentation here (it's for Arch but it'll work the same in Mint).

Thanks for those links.

You are exactly correct about the laptop, its SATA 2, so any SSD is faster than it needs.

I am really happy with Mint so far.  I switched to using libreoffice a few years ago on win 7, and that made the final transition to Mint very easy.

Next task - business card scanning and software with functionality similar to CardScan.  With 6 K business card scans, I can't just leave that behind, and really still need business card scanning capability.  That one is actually still on my xp box.  I guess in theory, I could try to run it under wine.

The access time as well transfer speed helps with SSDs.

And wine always helps (hic)

Run it on Windows 95 in a browser :'D

https://win95.ajf.me/

Amazing.