Performance increase with new hd and ram?

Im thinking about upgrading my W7J and was wondering what should I expect? Right now I have Fujitsu, heres the link http://193.128.183.41/home/v3__product.asp?pid=476&inf=fsp&wg=15 and 1.5gb of ram.

I'm planning on getting this hitachi http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10008894 and a 2gb stick of ram so it can be a total of 2.5gb. I'm also running vista 64bit.

 

What do you do?

RAM is always a quick, cheap and easy way to increase performance. Adding another gig of RAM to your notebook should give you a noticeable increase in performance. Since you have a 64bit operating system you could even invest in more RAM if you feel the need.

As for the hard drive. I doubt you will notice any difference in performance.

 

Without a doubt the Hitachi 7K320 is a much faster harddrive than your current 100gb 5400rpm drive. Your Fujitsu is based on two 60gb platters, so the density is 60gb per platter. The hitachi is based on two 160gb platters, so not only is the data density about 2.5x higher, but your also get a higher spindle speed. The loading times will be much faster with this drive and a fresh reinstall of windows.
Please note that the 7K320 is very power efficient, so battery life should not be any different than your current drive.

As far as memory goes, Vista seems optimal with 3-4Gb of memory. DDR2 is so cheap these days that you can get a 4Gb kit for around $35 or so. Your system can use PC5300 and or PC6400 memory. The PC6400 will simply clock down to PC5300 speeds when installed in your system
Check the deals section on notebook review, their is a 4Gb kit of OCZ for about $15 after rebate:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/forumdisplay.php?f=12

K-TRON

 

I just want to improve it for some gaming. And the max I can add is 2.5gb since 512 is soldered to the motherboard.

 

I thought a hdd is the worst bottleneck in any system, especially in laptops where the technology isn't as good as desktop hdd's. Why wouldn't it increase performance ? A fast(big) 7200 rpm drive is the best you can do to increase performance easily, imo.
Sure, it won't improve actual FPS when the game has loaded fully (xcept if it has stuttering issues, which fast hdd can resolve completely). But otherwise, the system would be a lot faster overall.

 

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the bottleneck depends on what you do.
For gaming, your GPU is pretty much always the bottleneck. You will rarely notice the difference in hard drives (a faster hard drive will decrease loading times, but in game performance will be mostly unaffected).
That's my understanding. As for overall performance (when just using the computer for regular stuff, i.e. word processing, web surfing, etc) I really didn't think it would make any difference. But I might be wrong.

One of the sticks is soldered on the motherboard? Really?
Well you can still get a 4GB stick (though it will be pretty expensive).

 

Their are ways to find out. Before you load a game, open task manager, if the game uses more than 90% cpu power than the cpu is bottlenecking the game. if the cpu load is say 30% the bottleneck is the graphics card.
The harddrive is always the slowest part of the system. Your cpu and graphics can keep up with even the fastest storage solution. A faster harddrive will decrease load times for everything. Memory is easy to tell, if your system frequently uses more memory than you have, its time for a memory upgrade.

Sorry about the 4Gb thing, your system may read a single 4GB module, but it will be very expensive. 2.5GB should be enough, especially stepping up from what you had

K-TRON