Wanting to upgrade RAM/HDD

Hi,

In a bid to extend my beloved Thinkpad's life a little further (it's already 2 years old, and the keyboard shows virtually no sign of wear), I'm thinking of upgrading the RAM and HDD inside, and actually hopefully the processor as well if I can find a loose Pentium M in a shop Actually thought of replacing the Thinkpad before, but once you've typed on one there's no turning back.

Just looking for other people's experience with similar upgrades to find out if it will be worth it.

My Thinkpad currently has 768MiB of RAM, of which at least 8MiB is taken up by the Extreme2 graphics adapter at all times. I am thinking of replacing the internal 256MiB module with a 1GiB module. Would such a change be worth the $110 or so it would cost? I can get modules from Apacer, Kingston or Corsair; which brand would be best?

As far as harddrives go, I'm considering the Seagate Momentus 5400.3 or the WD Scorpio. Both are priced about the same but the Seagate's new technology and 5-year warranty sound good. Has anyone had problems with this model? Like, does it run hot or anything or gets damaged easily?

 

At China, anyboby used Seagate Momentus 5400.3, on someboby's notebook with one mounth, it can make voice listened like "ka ta".

I used HDD is Fujitsu MHV Series, it has withstanded the Photoshop test with make a picture resolution to 60000×60000. At that test, the temp file is 13.6GB, finished file is 1.7GB.

A reliable HDD is very important. The new HDD is better than old, that's recognized.

768M RAM, enough.

 

A gig would help a little, but I don't know what apps you use....try newegg.com for cheaper ram (70-80 bucks).

i don't think a harddrive upgrade would do much for you.

 

I'm in Malaysia, where pretty much all computer-related buying is done in shops. One consequence is that although competition is fierce and prices are (relatively) low, the range of available products can be quite limited.

I usually use office apps and surf the net, but I also watch a lot of movies (DVDs, AVI files under various compressions and the occasional H.264 one). My favourite games are simulator and football management games (editions my graphics card can cope with), which are usually memory- and CPU-intensive. I can see harddrive upgrade speeding up my boot and load times (current boot time in excess of 2 minutes, after quite a bit of tweaking and full defrag)

 

What is the hard drive you have in there now? If it is a 4,200RPM drive, then you will see a nice boost if you install a 5,400 or 7,200RPM drive. Western Digital makes the best-built 5,400RPM drives in my opinion. Hitachi & Seagate are the only ones that make 7,200's, and they are both good. Seagate's a bit quieter.

 

If this,you can run "msconfig", clean the boot page, maybe some unimportant programs are there to waste system idle process.

 

Have done all the suggested cleaning in the past, and I do check it every now and then for any new, unwanted startup programs. I've left the Thinkvantage programs alone as I've already uninstalled all the less useful ones and need the features the remaining ones provide. The biggest causes of lag according to Bootvis is the network logon and the multitude of Thinkpad drivers.

My Thinkpad's stock hard drive is a 40GB 4200rpm Hitachi Travelstar, I'm not quite sure exactly which model it is. 7200rpm drives are not abundant in Malaysia and are very expensive so I plan to opt for 5400rpm instead.

 

It'll still be a good upgrade. More memory won't hurt, especially from what you're saying you use it for. I always like more memory though The best way to see if it'd help is to see what your pagefile usage is. If you continually swap to the hard drive when running your games, then you'll see a nice speed boost from the extra memory.

 

oh. sorry about that misinformation. A 5400 rpm will improve performance noticeably.

 

Thanks for the advice muchly.

Final question: I read an earlier reply that Seagate's Momentus drives start making weird noises after a while. Has anyone else experienced this problem? A 5-year warranty is a nice thing but well, I'd rather not have to claim on it