With a SSD adapter circuit board temporarily held in place with painter's tape, I powered up this old HP Split X2 (13-r010dx) to see if it's willing to run on a modern M.2 SSD. The answer is yes -- and quite well!

I have a USB flash drive prepared by the Windows Media Creation Tool for installing Windows 10 2004, and I could select it as the boot device by holding down F9 upon power-up. From there it was an uneventful Windows 10 installation, automatically activated by a Windows 8 license embedded in hardware.

Here is the "Before" picture, taken a few minutes after the computer has booted up on the original WD5000M21K hard drive. The computer is completely saturated with Windows startup tasks and it takes a few minutes to even get Task Manager up and running and a screenshot tool. From here we can see we're doing well on memory, with only half used. The CPU is largely idle. They are all waiting for the disk.

Here is the "After" picture, taken shortly after the computer started up for the first time running Windows 10 freshly installed on the M.2 SSD. Disk overhead has stopped being a constraining factor. The memory is about the same, and now the humble low power Core i3 CPU is the constraining factor as this computer is chewing through information to decide what to download from Windows Update.

Once Windows was up to date, all drivers were automatically installed, and this computer was ready to go. A reboot verified that startup time has gone from several minutes down to less than 30 seconds. Launching and switching between applications are nearly instantaneous. When the meager 4GB RAM starts running low, virtual memory on the SSD is perfectly usable and not the molasses slow torture session it used to be.

The Core i3 might be the low end of the Core line, but it is far faster than an Atom chip of similar vintage. Freed from the shackles of its molasses slow stock HDD, this computer is now perfectly comfortable running up-to-date Windows 10 and modern applications. This SSD upgrade has proven to be a hugely beneficial transformation for this old computer. Which was fantastic! Except for one problem... how do I make sure it doesn't rattle around inside the machine?