Which is more valuable: 2 gig ram or 7200 rpm 100 gb hd?

I'm about to purchase my dell e1505, i'm in a budget so i can pick either the 7200 rpm drive or the extra gb. i'm not upgrading my ram after market due to personal preference. Should I fork over the extra ~125 for the ram or the 7200 rpm drive?

Thanks.

 

If that's the way it is... get the ram.

There are no easier, or even that many more possible upgrades than ram or hard drive. Either would take 5-10 minutes to complete.

 

Get the memory if you refuse to upgrade after market, although I'm not sure why you would not want to do so. Hard drive speed will reduce loading times--a good thing certainly, but more RAM is more important

 

Well you can upgrade either later, but I would get the 2 gig ram.

you would have to buy 2 sticks of 1 gig ram to upgrade later on...

 

hm, okay.

exactly what will the ram provide that is more significant to the 7200 rpm's benefits?

and for the record, i'm not a serious gamer.

Thanks again.

 

More RAM will give you better overall performance--to use an analogy-consider your computer as an office. Think of your desk as RAM and the file cabinet as the hard disk. The number of documents you can cover the desk with is limited by the size of the desk (RAM). The file cabinet might be huge, but you can only have as many things open at a time as your desk will fit. If you have a small desk you will constantly have to file & remove items from the cabinet in order to keep your desk open. A faster hard disk will allow you do switch documents faster but it doesn't stop the fact that you do have to still switch documents. I know that's kind of an incongruous analogy.

7200 RPM hard disks will lower loading times in general, whether you're loading games or windows. It's usually not as important as memory. More memory will make your computing experience smoother as things don't constantly have to be shuffled between the desk and cabinet.


Gamers like to have fast disks because it decreases the number of seconds they have to wait for the loading bar to fill.

EDIT: 5400 RPM 2.5 inch disks are faster than 3.5 inch 5400 RPM disks because the data is on a smaller area. There is less area to seek. Consider this thread.

 

Also:

Additional RAM will reduce the time windows spends running up your hard drive by keeping more things 'on-hand' in memory. Less time spent running the hard drive = longer battery life.

 

If you like to multitask or work with memory intensive applications such as Photoshop or video editing, more memory can be of real benefit.
The benefit from a 7200rpm drive only really comes into play when you are loading large files or a lot of sequential files such as booting up Windows, loading large levels in a game or copying large or several files. For normal disk access which is normally relatively small files, there is little benefit as the drive spends more time seeking for the data than actually transferring it. Overall, although a 7200 rpm drive will be faster, it wont be a huge difference for the majority of laptop users - I personally upgraded my last laptop to a 7200rpm drive but haven't bothered with my current laptop as I wasn't seeing much of a benefit and the 5400rpm is working fine for my needs not to mention consuming a little less power as well. I always upgrade my memory though as I like to multi task and use Photoshop etc. More memory is especially beneficial when using dual core cpus as they will allow you to multitask a lot more.

 

I'd say It all comes down to what you’re doing with it. If you’re not a big multitasker, don't have many windows or apps running at once then having 2GB's of RAM may not benefit you at all. But if you often copy files back and forth and run lots of single apps that require a lot of loading, the HD might benefit you. In general though I'd say the RAM is a better upgrade.

 

I second that. 2GB is pointless for just word processing and internet with a bit of multimedia on the side (basically office work). But then again a 7200RPM won’t give you a big performance boost for those kinds of things either

 

Personally, I would go for the extra GB. You will never have enough hard drive space. Beside, the ram very easily accessible, so if you ever feel like you need the extra gig, you could easily upgrade it. Also, I think that the 7200RPM is mostly useless, unless you are a hardcore game who hate loading time. Plus, it would also suck up more juice from the battery than the 5400RPM.