Upgrading a HD and CPU on a zv6130us

Hey everyone,

I recently upgraded the ram in my laptop from 512MB to the max 2GB that it can use. Now I am comtemplating how I should upgrade my HD and CPU. I currently have the stock 80GB 4200rpm HD that comes in the zv6130us.

For the HD, I've been looking at the Hitachi Travelstar 7k100 100GB 7200rpm HardDrive and the Seagate Momentus 5400.2 120GB 5400rpm HardDrive. Both are roughly $140 on Newegg.com.

Now that the AMD Athlon 64 Socket 939 have gone down considerably in price, I was wondering if I should upgrade the CPU as well. An AMD Athlon 64 4000+ is $130 which is pretty cheap I guess.

Some people have told me that upgrading the HD will make the biggest difference in terms of noticing speed. However, I was wondering if the speed difference between the 7k100 and the Momentus is that big to consider going with the 7k100 and sacrificing an extra potential 20GB.

Also once I upgrade my HD to either of those two HDs, since the HD makes the biggest improvement, what exactly will upgrading to a 4000+ affect. Will it make that much of a difference as well or should I stick with my 3200+? Some have told me it will, some said not really.

The only game I'm really playing right now on my laptop is WoW, Guild Wars, the Movies and the Sims 2 and SiN: Episode 1. Load times seem pretty slow in WoW and especially SiN. SiN seems like it takes forever to load up a new part of a level. I also use Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash and DVD Authoring/Converting software a lot.

Thanks a lot in advance

 

I doubt the performance difference between the 120GB 5400 and 100GB 7200 will be considerable . . a relatively small, but noticable boost most likely - not something you'll jump out of your seat about. If you need more storage, then go for the 120GB. It will be still be faster than your current drive.

You won't see much of a change in 3D performance; the Radeon X200M is your bottleneck, not your processor. Unless you are doing very processor-intensive tasks, I wouldn't do the CPU upgrade. The RAM and HDD are the two most practical components to upgrade. Check to see if upgrading the CPU voids your warranty.

 

Your processor is powerful enough to outlast your notebook, IMO. I have zv6000 myself and I also think that a faster HDD is really the more important upgrade.
You've maxed out the RAM so you can't go much faster than that (I suppose you have 2x1gb PC2700 since 2x1gb PC3200 requires a bit of tweaking to get working). Don't bother with the CPU upgrade unless you are a benchmarking freak

 

Yea I put 2x1GB PC2700 Kingston sticks in there and there are still times when I do music, photoshop and such, that my laptop still slows down. I'm assuming that's due to my slow HD speed.

So why exactly would anyone really want to upgrade their CPU in laptops like ours. What constitutes as a processor-intensive task?

 

Do you notice the hard drive light being on constantly when your system slows down? Open up the Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete) and watch your CPU usage too.

 

If you encode/decode movies (most types of heavy file compression) you will see your CPU limits. I, personally, would not put my laptop through a full scale DVD compression/conversion simply because the heat will be significant and that's what could damage it.
Games usually use 100% of the CPU but I don't count them as CPU intensive because if you restrict the CPU to a lower multiplier, it will be again maxed out but the performance would not suffer.

 

the same reason guys buy big cars

 

I have upgraded my zv6000 to the FX-55 (from the 3500+). For $140 it was a pretty cheap upgrade.