dv4000 hard drive upgrade?

I'm strongly considering buying the dv4000 soon...trying to find ways to save a bit of cash here and there, but I may be being too picky.

I know I can save a bit on the RAM, does anyone know if it is possible to upgrade the hard drive for less than I can on the cusomtizable site? Or, first, is it even possible to upgrade the hard drive? BTW, I want an 80GB 5400rpm drive...at the least, 7400rpm is always better if I can upgrade, but the $ might be too much now..

ALSO, just remembered about this about the RAM...the HP site says "Dual Channel is only supported when the system is configured with DDR2 symmetric memory (i.e. 2x512MB).", seemingly meaining that the RAM and the computer in general will function better with DUAL channel, when both memory slots are occupied by two, identical size RAM chips. Is this true?

Based upon this, I was planning to get 2 512MBs. But if it not true, I rather save a bit of $, get a 256MB and add a 1GB Kingston card -- will this function just as well or better?

Thanks in advance.

 

That is a nice laptop for a cheap gaming machine. As long as you don't do photo editing or encoding, a 80GB 5400 rpm drive would work fine. I have the Hitachi 60 GB 5400 rpm drive and it is plenty fast for my needs. I would recommend upgrading to the 80GB drive from HP, but it depends if you want an external drive or not, if you do then go with the smaller one and buy it yourself and upgrade it and get an enclosure for the other one. The hard drive is very easy to upgrade, it's usually right under a cover on the bottom. It, along with the RAM upgrade are the two best upgrades you can do for performance increases.

Matt

 

Cool, thanks. I'm in architecture school, so I will do alot of photoediting and cpu intensive type work, so perhaps a 7400rpm hard drive is better?

I think I edited my first post after you replied -- any thoughts on the RAM upgrade question, whether 2x512MB is better or one 256MB + one 1GB is better?

Thanks again.

 

The $80 HP charges for the drive is slightly less than a new one. You are going to want to wipe it anyway because of all the bloatware HP puts on there. Dual channel offers a slight performance increase not huge.