Upgrade my IBM T42? Make a big difference?

Will upgrading to 2Gb of RAM and a 7200 rpm hard drive make a difference in my IBM T42 laptop? I'd be spending about $150 to upgrade. Should I do it or just save my money and try to sell my T42 on eBay and buy a new laptop?

I would be upgrading RAM from 1.25 gb to 2.00 gb and my hard drive from a 40 gb (5400 rpm) to 80 gb (7200 rpm)

Here's my current system:

IBM T42

Pentium M 1500MHz
1.25 GB DDR 2700 SDRAM
40 GB Hard Drive (5400 rpm)
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics (64MB RAM);
DVD/CD-RW drive;
15.0-inch screen
Intel 802.11b wireless
Windows XP Professional

 

Unless you are doing something really demanding I don't think the RAM upgrade will make much difference in XP. The HDD on the other hand could make quite a big difference. If can put off buying a new laptop for another 6-12 months by spending $80-100 on a HDD, you might as well, laptops are only going to get cheaper and faster.

 

I personally would save your cash and not spend on either. If i was to spend money, i would agree with Tumnasgt, the ram isn't a good choice, but the Hard Drive would decrease boot times and increase the life of your computer.

 

I'm a graphic designer and usually run Adobe CS3 Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Firefox and Microsoft Outlook at the same time so it is really demanding work.

I have a 512 MB Ram stick so I could replace the 256 MB of RAM and bump up my system to 1.5 MB Ram. So I guess bumping it to 2GB of RAM would be that much difference?

 

I have a T42 14" also. Same specs as yours but with a Hitachi 7200RPM drive and I run Photoshop CS3 just fine. My trusty laptop for 3+ yrs.

I would never sell mine. It'll be with me until it breaks.

 

Well, given that you run programs that are clear memory hogs, and that you have a 512 stick, you might as well do that. And a faster hard drive is also sensible, since these same programs read and write massive image files.

Digging into the memory question a little deeper, my actual suggestion is that you monitor memory useage with task manager or similar program (I use "What's Running"). If you are close to using it all, then more memory will help. But if not, you will need to look elsewhere (including saving for a new notebook).

 

When you are using all of the apps you normally use, how much pagefile and RAM are you using?

 

How do I check that?

 

Task Manager (or other similar program).