Go back and show me where I said that there is no way that putting the swap file at the beginning of a drive would not increase performance.
I dispute your suggestion that he should go acquire more hardware (and old stuff too) and run that in the hopes of achieving any kind of better performance.
So, yes, call it my opinion, but I don't think the 'experts' that you reference would agree with your advice either. If he already had two disks, and neither one of them was an old POS, then sure, follow your advice. However, that was not what the question was about.
The question is about ONE drive. This guy has one drive, and you're telling him hes going to improve performance by going out and finding another piece of hardware and sticking that in there? As long as we're on the subject of adding hardware to fix a problem, why not just tell him to get a few more sticks of ram and get rid of the page file altogether? You could certainly do that for about the price of a decent second hard drive, and the performance improvements would be MUCH more profound.