Is it to be or not to be...

The other day my MX6920 started having issues. Specs here: ????????????????????????
When the screen saver was on and you went to move mouse or hit keys the computer would freeze. Well, reboot and repeat you get the picture. Thought it might be virus and had anti virus running but scanned, swept, antimalwarebytes, speedupmypc, ccleaner etc.. and nothing. Friday I had shut off the screen saver.
Saturday morning it was just freezing randomly. At point of reboot it was hanging on the windows loading screen, initinally the hard drive light would come on but then go off and it would just say it was loading- blinking bar in middle of screen, but no lights blinking, nada. Did a system point restore to a point(safe mode) when there were no issues and again in reboot would hang on the loading screen. I then suspected it was a hard drive issue.
I then had my wifes father give it a go, he builds pc's and runs only XP on his systems. He found that the hard drive had some bad sectors, 5 in all, 1 unrecoverable, but for some reason the software he was using wouldn't mark the sectors bad and then move the files to new sectors. It was a first for him. Anyway now that I know its the hard drive, I have decided to get new one and upgrade to Win 7.
Here are the questions. Can I, without a huge headache? I searched on Gateways site for Win 7 driver updates for the model but I don't see any. Just Xp and Vista. Would you do 32 bit or 64 bit? Does the bios prohibit a faster hard drive say 7200 320gb? Just don't want to throw $120-$150(hard drive and OS) into it and it constantly be an issue with a driver or something. Is it to be or not to be, that is the question.
Thanks in advance.

 

****crickets*****

 

Your post was a bit hard to read because of the lack of double spaces.

It looks like you're searching for a laptop hard drive. You can get a 320GB hard drive (make sure it's SATA) or even more for much cheaper prices. Newegg and a few others offer hard drives for as low as $50.

Here's an example of a top selling laptop hard drive from Newegg:
Link

Disregard anything about driver compatibility. If it works on Vista, it works in Windows 7. Make sure you get the 32 bit version of Windows 7 since your laptop only supports a maximum of 2GB.

 

Thanks masked, but I already knew I needed a hard drive. My question still is: "does the bios prohibit a faster running one"? I had heard that this might be an issue. Otherwise I'll have to get the slower 5400 rpm version. For that matter does it also prohibit the size as well?
The news regarding OS is a good one.

 

No, it does not.

 

Thanks !!!!