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Thanks for the awesome write-up! It's distressing to see that amount of thermal paste, but unfortunately not abnormal, regardless of the manufacturer you're looking at (including Apple). One nice thing I see here is that it doesn't look like an awful process on the whole, aside from the number of screws on the bottom of the chassis... You deserve a lot of credit for tearing down a pretty pricy laptop to do this type of work. As you note, it should go a long way toward extending the life of your equipment!

Definitely possible, but it will get painful long-term. Aside from the difficulties inherent in managing a dual-drive system efficiently, Windows will bloat over time with updates and (more annoyingly) backup/uninstall files for those updates. Cached installers and driver files can add up too... While all of that can be managed to a degree, 24GB is cutting it pretty close for comfort, to the point where you may as well just replace it with a higher capacity device or (better yet) go pure SSD or SSD+HDD via the Ultrabay.

I believe the rule of thumb for page file size (i.e. a multiple of your RAM capacity) is more about being able to dump the contents of memory in the event of a crash. I run a similar setup to yours (16GB RAM/256GB SSD) and keep my page file set to a minimum of 100MB and a maximum of 1024MB (1GB). It's important to have from a functional perspective, as some applications are simply programed to use/require it, but I see no reason to make it any larger than it needs to be. That said, I do not think that you are going to see a meaningful difference no matter its size, given a generous amount of RAM and ultra fast storage in the form of an SSD. While it will continue to serve a purpose as an OS component, its impact on performance is simply lost in a system backed by modern equipment.

Which department were you speaking with when they offered to send you one under warranty? Just wondering if it was general tech support or the parts folks... Also, if you happen to get the Broadcom chip, it would be interesting to see the hardware ID once installed, since they are pretty easy to come across in the aftermarket, just not sure if any old card with that chip would be properly whitelisted. On the other hand, I haven't seen the Lite-On anywhere but Lenovo's own manuals.