How good or bad of performance is the basic 80gb hardrive (E1505)

I purchased an E1505 yesterday with the coupon discount and wanted to keep it as low as possible over the $1399 minimum to get the $500 dollar discount. I went overbudget already and wanted to keep it as close to $900 as possible. In the end I managed to get a lot of nice upgrades. T7200, ATI X1400, Bluetooth, WSXGA+, 9-cell, etc. I am planning on buying a couple rams sticks to upgrade to 2gb of ram (should I do 3 or 4 with ram being so cheap right now?) as soon as I get some spare cash.

The only things I question is not upgrading the hard drive. Will the 80gb hard drive be a big lag on performance compared to the rest of the system? I plan on using word, excel, web browsing, e-mail, and some gaming. Should I be considering a new hard drive when I can afford it?

If so which ones, I worry the 80-160 gb Seagate 7200rpm momentus will get too hot (I have read this from some reviewers on newegg)

 

New 7200RPM drives do not run any hotter than a 5400RPM drive. The basic drive is probably 5400RPM drive, and for normal usage is perfectly fine.

 

Thanks for the quick response Charr. That is what I was hoping to hear. I am coming from an old Gateway Pentium III Desktop and don't have any files to transfer or anything. I felt that for the moment 80gb was plenty big in size. Then I thought about it being the basic model and worried it would hinder the performance of games and itunes.

Now my only worry is Windows Vista

All I know is that it can't be much worse than running Windows XP when I upgraded from Windows 2000 on my Gateway PIII 900Mhz, 128mb ram, and GeForce MX440 64mb vram

 

As long as you do not get a 4200RPM drive, you'll be fine no matter what.