The speed it runs at depends on the settings you use, iirc. I'm guessing scaling slows it down, while playing at 1:1 scale it runs faster.
I think there's grayscale settings as well, maybe try playing with those? Haven't played with ti-boy for >1 year so I don't really remember much

Nah they are still down. If you click the links it says 403 Forbidden. I don't remember why they were taken down, although maybe it was for safety reasons or something (stalking/spying/finding old passwords/etc)

Iirc it was because of google's bot making running resource-intensive things and ignoring robots.txt or something like that.

Responding to the questions from the stuff I know without looking around too much:

1. It's not possible to switch out the CX's keypads, that's only possible with the grayscale ones

2. OS 3.1 has lua and Ndless 3.1 works on it. This works on the CX.

3. Technically it isn't legal to distribute the boots and such because they're copyrighted by TI.  Google is your friend for this.

4. Usually, with new OS versions, the OS upgrade process or something makes it impossible to downgrade to the OS below. However 3.2 (with more lua stuff but no ndless) allows you to downgrade to 3.1 (both ndless and lua).  (iirc there's a way to patch the OS to remove this protection tho)
The oldest OS the CX can run, downgrade blocks and otherwise, is 3.0. You can upgrade from 3.0 to 3.1 and use the ndless that works with that, tho

Nice guide

I guess if the person can't install anything or for whatever reason can't use one of the programs (can't really think of one b/c you can just stick some on a flash drive but you never know), there's also the IRC link at the top of the page, which goes to a browser-based client.

I think there might be a program somewhere that tells you if you have the extra ram..I want to say thepenguin or calc84 made it but I'm not sure.

You could always try something like the TI-Boy alpha and see if it errors out

I thought Eeems was an android?

Yeah, I seem to remember him being an android at some point in the past...unless there's android lobsters or something now? 

The bookroom at my high school lends out mostly 83pbe's, along with some pink 84pse's (popularized by the included PuzzPack) and the occasional 82.
Seems like they kind of dole them out indiscriminately at that, in one class there were all three different models and someone even had a viewscreen 83

Also the little 30-packs of TI-108s, tho those aren't exactly graphing are they