Replacing my 5400 drive with 7200 on HP DV 6000t

I purchased a Seagate Momentus 100 gig 7200 rpm drive, which I intend to replace in my HP DV6000t, removing the 5400 rpm drive. My laptop runs very cool, so heat is not an issue to me. I chose the Seagate over the Hitachi because it is said to be quieter.
I want to be able to compare the performance of the drives, and want to make sure I do an "apples to apples" comparison. My question is should I do a Fresh install of XP, drivers, etc., w/o all of the HP bloatware, or should I just Ghost (over a network) the new drive to make it identical in content to the old one?

Second question is should I expect better performance from a fresh XP and driver install, compared to a "Ghost" install?

Third question: What single comprehensive benchmark program would you use to do the comparison?

 

1. If you really need to compare then you should ghost the disk , it will also save you time .

2. Fresh is usually lighter and faster unless you optimized it later .

3. Hd tune is HD specific (seek , transfer , etc. ) .

 

I would use the benchmarks in this comprehensive guide to notebook hard drives at Tomshardware and then you could compare your results to theirs.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25.html

 

I use HDtach for comparing drives, usually.

 

Find or make a file that is 1 GB. Copy it from one place on the disk to another. Do the same thing when you install the hard drive.

Since the burst rate will be the same because it is IDE, you will just be getting better sustained transfer rates, which is what the copying of the file will tell you. It will be take into account all the values, like seek time, latency, and write time.