Laptop critical Upgrades

After I decided to skip the purchase of a Mac for some (perhaps) much needed currency in my future germanic endeavor, I had, however, to upgrade my existing IBM laptop and make it more versatile, and thus, capable to do the job he's supposed to do.
for this purpose I bought the following:

1. a new 80GB harddrive from Seagate (the Seagate Momentus 5400.2 ST96812A 60GB 5400 RPM 8MB) with 60 bucks (now it went down to 55$ shipping included). It's asmoothy..no problem so far. Plus I have a 5 year guarantee. At least that's what newegg.com says. hopefully I will not use it.

2. a combo drive (DVD/CDRW) since I am not sure if I will have acces to a drive that easy over there..and I do not want to buy a new one.

3. RAM. the memory is a tough one. so so so expensive and hard to find for these old bastards. I had to pay 73 bucks for two dimms of 256mb and wrestle with a bunch of other ebayers looking for the same thing. :((. At least I hope to sell my two 128 DIMMs for 35$ and cut down the losses.

4. A SATA/IDE external enclosure to take advantage of big and fast SATA drives. Pretty expensive ($20) but at least I was sure that it can manage the EU standard voltage (240 V) which was crucial. Besides that, just two cables and upss, people are making real money with these things.

5. PCMCIA USB 2 port. A deal for just $10..but I couldn't make it work.:((. NO USB pen, mouse or other device did work in it. But the enclosure did however and the SATA drive is great, I could feel the USB2.0 pumping unlike the old 1.1 that any T22 has in the back..:))

6. a bigger USB pen (1gb); just a perk; nothing about it since I do not keep huge files, or do "backup" as some do on such fragile and no-name things. It's just good to have one. I had a viking before (256mb) who did the job spendidly.

well, that's about it. there goes my post and my money.
worthwhile, i hope.