Is a faster HD on a ASUS F3JP worth $89?

I am just about ready to buy the ASUS F3JP-AKO48P but am trying to decide whether to go from the standard 120GB/5400 drive to a Seagate Momentus 100GB/7200 for $89. Also the vendor (GenTech) is willing to upgrade to 2GB of RAM for another $89 which seems like a good deal but is using a different brand of RAM (Aeroen). I would like to keep the manufactuers the same but am not sure if this is that important. It appears that GenTech is rated well in Resellersratings.

Any helpful insights on this is welcome!

Thanks

 

Personally I'd go for the faster hard drive, slow loading times is a pet peeve of mine. As to the ram, it'll be fine, you won't notice a difference between the two companies.

 

The 7200rpm ones are nice. Windows loads much faster and disk-intensive programs see good performance gains. My old Dell Inspiron 600m booted much better when I made the move to 7200rpm, but I discovered that the battery life dropped by 10-15%.

However, they tend to suck up more battery. You can usually change drive settings for spin-up/-down times, but it doesn't make a huge difference.

My advice is to stick with a 5400rpm drive unless you absolutely must have that last 1% of performance.

 

1.) The memory will be fine, I have run mixed memory, branded memory, and no-name memory all with no issues. I bet the memory is a pretty good deal @ 89 dollars, but confirm that you can't upgrade cheaper on your own ( www.newegg.com)
2.) Unless you absolutely MUST have the extra 20GB in your laptop I would go for the faster drive. A 7200 RPM will offer faster loading times and if you find yourself lacking space an external hard drive is a cheap and easy solution.

Welcome to the forums!

I'm going to move this to the hardware forum where hopefully you'll get a better response.

EDIT: A faster hard drive should NOT significantly affect heat or battery run time.

 

Ditto on the faster drive. If you game at all you'll be very thankful you bought it, and it makes things quicker all around with faster loading and access times. There should be very minimal impact on energy consumption, and therefore little effect on battery life (according to all reviews I've read).

 

thanks for all the help guys. I think I will go for the Seagate HD and wait on the 1GB RAM for now. I can always upgrade that later for about the same price at newegg. How do you think Vista Prem will run on this lappy with the standard 1GB?

 

Both those are great deals. wait on the memory though.

It will run , but it won't run great. I used to be on 1gb and vista is world's better on 2gb which I now have.