Non-Gamer Hard Drive and Graphics Question

I'm in the market for a new laptop and I'm trying to make sure I spend my money upgrading the right components.

I'm not a gamer at all and I'm wondering whether either a 7200 rpm hard drive or discrete graphics are worth the money and battery life hit for me.

Generally, I use the computer basic office productivity type tasks and I do plan to run Vista on the machine. Also, I'm an econ grad student so I run some fairly intense computer code (statistical and mathematical software) and I use ArcMap GIS with some degree of frequency, both of which tax my current computer fairly heavily.

Will I get much of a performance boost from either the faster hard drive or the discrete graphics in these types of applications? Will Robson make any difference here?

Thanks!

 

I don't think you need a dedicated GPU an X3100 will be more than enough.[I think it can even handle the Aero well].
About the data, is there a lot of data that your computer processes ? [in size]
I think the most important thing here will be to have adequate amount of memory.
And about the Robson, the improvement seems to be minor [in some cases] and negative [in case of boot and hibernate time], I don't think it'll be worth the extra cash [though the Robson can be installed afterwards].

 

I agree - I'd focus on a good CPU and RAM.

So long as you avoid any IGP older than Intel's GMA 950 you should be OK.

The performance gains from 7200 RPM hard drives are pretty small. A good perpendicular recording 5400 RPM drive can outperform an older 7200 one.

 

With ArcMap, make sure you get at least a dedicated graphics card, if not a fast one. It's worth it. If you use large GIS data sets, you will want the 7200RPM hard drive, or a large 5400RPM drive. A 160GB 5400RPM drive performs roughly similar to a 7200RPM 100GB drive. And go with 2GB of RAM, especially with Vista and such.

As a grad student, if you ever want prettier pictures for dissertations and presentations than ArcMap will provide, go ahead and PM me and we can talk about it. I have a copy of 3DNature's VNS, which is much better at doing visualization than any of ESRI's products, and I haven't had much of a chance to use it for a whole lot lately (I worked for 3DNature for a number of years)