Vostro 1400 components

Almost ready to order the Vostro 1400.
Is there any reason to go to Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 instead of T5470 for later 64bit compatibility for photography (Lightroom & CS) & Internet (no gaming)? ($55 difference)
Is it worthwhile to go to 7200 RPM 160GB hard drive rather than 5400 RPM? ($75)
Which mouse is best?

 

for your needs no need to upgrade the cpu. the hard drive too is not worth it as theonly diiference u will see is in loading times so for internet browsing very little change will be experienced.

 

They both have 64-bit capability:
http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/core2duo.htm

It looks like the T7250 should be about 25% faster than the T5470 (2.0 GHz vs. 1.6 GHz, same bus speed and L2 cache)... so you decide.

The faster hard drive should make the machine a little snappier overall (although perhaps slightly noisier too). So... again, it's up to you.

You'll want a good amount of RAM for what you're doing... but you may wish to buy it elsewhere (e.g. newegg.com) to save money.

 

Will the hard drive speed affect loading of photos and layers in PS? (I'm getting 2GB of RAM)
Any thoughts on a mouse for travel?

 

When you say Lightroom/PS, you are saying a program that can easily use 2 or 3 giga of Ram. Really. That means you need a lot of Ram, the better cpu and a faster hardrive.

When a project has 2 giga of occupied Ram, you wish to load fast, so you need the faster hardrive.

 

Thank you all. I really appreciate the help.
Sorinat - that's what I was concerned about. I'll try to bump to the 7200RPM and see what I can do with the processor. I found a huge difference in CS and Lightroom when I bumped my desktop up to 2GB RAM from 1GB. I'm staying with XP because it's running really well on my desktop and it won't eat the memory like Vista. This is my first laptop so I'm balancing between cost and performance but it needs to handle the photo work when I travel or take workshops.

 

IMO, nether one if worth the upgrade. take your $100 and get yourself 4 gigs of RAM and more harddrive space. When it comes to photos and videos, nothing beats more RAM and extra harddrive space. Those few extra milliseconds you'll save with a 7200RPM drive will be for nothing if you have to later add on and work off of an external harddrive. Plus the fuss and extra time of connecting an external drive will just chew up that time you "saved."

The 4 gigs of RAM is alone worth the cost. dollar for dollar, $75 of RAM will outgain $75 of HD performance.