Definitely faster, for the first compile after booting. But after that, no difference, since it's all in the Linux page cache (RAM). Running diff between two kernel trees is incredibly quick now, though. And synaptic is much, much faster than before.

Booting is also *much* faster.

And my favourite: updatedb takes about five seconds after a fresh boot, rather than many minutes.

I just wish the machine had a SATA2 chipset, so that Firefox would load in under two seconds rather than three seconds.

Cheers