newbie help....4200rpm to 7200rpm

hi all...first of all..thanks everyone for this great forum. i m a student and have recently bought a compaq v5094 with AMD ML-37:turion: , 1 gig of ram and 100gig of storage. I m in luv with this notebook (just like all of us ) and find it very capable at a very reasonable price. after this purchase i m still left with a bit dough and m thinking of upgrading the only weak link...that being the slow 4200 rpm hard disk. i have found a seagate 100 gig 7200 and a similar speced hitachi at dabs.com for around £130 and its within my budget. my obvious question is...should i go for it??? i think i should but i m a bit skeptical about the extra heat and reliabilty because of the higher speeds. also, would the gain be substantial ( i think it would be )?? i wud n't be upgrading the hard disk every month so i want to straight away go for 7200 rather than 5400 and i m not intersted in going to 80 gig 7200 either coz that wud be a bit of a downgrade from 100gig. so to u guys....is this upgrade worth the effort??

alternatively, i can go for the ram upgrade from 1gig to 2gig but i think 1gig is more than enough for the time being (no i don't play games coz it has got ATI xpress 200 but ateast dedicated ), but i m still open to suggestions. if u guys had the same machine and had the options, what wud be first on your things to do list??

once again...thanks alot for this very informative and active forum.

 

If it was mine I'd go for the hard drive first. You'll likely see the most immediate and obvious performance gain out of that. I think you'll be fine for now with 1GB of memory. (Until Vista ships, anyway. )

 

thanks mach_zero...that was super quick...u got 2gig ram running in u ??

 

Nope - just 1GB. And I haven't come up against anything (yet) that would persuade me to upgrade. Of course, I only mostly do office and light video stuff and the occassional bout of Half Life 2. But for right now I believe 2GB is still overkill for the majority of users.

 

90 views and no reply except one guy . oh come on folks............u can do better than that. i m waiting for ur sugesstions and opinions.

cheers

 

I would go for the Hard Drive. The reason why most people don't reply is probably because they agree with mach_zero. The upgrade from a 4200 rpm HDD to a 7200 will definitely be noticable, while an upgrade from 1 GB of RAM to 2 GB of RAM will only be noticable if you run RAM intensive applications.

 

Yeah, do upgrade the hard drive. I upgraded from 1GB RAM to 2GB, and it doesn't make a lot of real-world difference except in the most intensive of applications.

 

4200 rpm to 7200 rpm is a substantial upgrade. You will notice and feel the difference in everything you do.

The RAM upgrade will not be noticeable.

Go for the HD upgrade.

 

Hard Drive for sure! I use to be a big fan of dabs but have found ebuyer.co.uk not only to have better prices but service too. So check them out you might find it cheaper...

 

I'm kinda in the same boat, except that I haven't bought a computer yet. I'm looking at the Hp dv 8000t and it has the dual HD's. But they off only one at 7200 rpm, which is 100 GB. The other hard drive I am interested in has 240 GB (dual 120 GB) but only at 5400 rpm. Should I go with the 7200 rpm or am I going to need the 240 GB? I'm going to be storing music and some other light files on it.. but nothing too intense. Also, if I need more HD space should I buy an aftermarket HD? If so where is the best place to buy one and can I install it myself without possibly screwing something up? Thanks

 

I just upgraded my hd from 4200 rpm to 5400 rpm, it loads Windows muhc faster.

4200rpm = 1 min and 30 sec
5400rpm = 1 min

JC

 

thanks alot everyone.......i've decided to go for the hard disk. just one more question.....after i've replaced the hard drive i.e. put the new drive in the notebook then is the installation as easy as putting in the reinstallation CD (i've got that), booting and installing the drivers again or is it lot more complex then that??

thanks once again

 

Most notebooks come with recovery CDs that installs the OS, drivers and the apps that were originally loaded with it. If you installed new stuff after you bought the computer then those apps needs to be re-installed also.

So yes its just a matter of sticking in the CD and following the instructions. Make sure its booting from CD then your fine (you can do this in the bios)...

Backup anything important as everything will usually be wiped.

 

It's entirely upto you whether to go for dual 5400rpm 120GB (240GB) drive or go for 1x 100GB 7200rpm drive. If they cost the same I would definitely go for dual setup.

If you want more storage later an external usb2/firewire drive will do the job. You just plug it in... Its that simple.

 

one thing you should keep in mind is battery life. The upgrade from 5400rpm to 7200rpm will considerably shorter you battery life. Also, there is no point in upgrading your hard drive if you don't do any processor intensive stuff like gaming or video editing. If all you do is stuff life MS office and playing music, don't upgrade. In the same respect, the RAM upgrade might be a waste of money to if you don;t use it to it's full potential

as with the re-installation, it should be very simple.

 

Well thats not entirely true, The battery life hit is not that much at all! the faster the drive the less time it spends on the tasks. If you look at benchmarks etc its about 5 to 10 minutes difference if you're used to getting 180 minutes battery life so a very small hit when compaired to the gains.
I put my 4200rpm drive back in to get copy the recovery partition from the 4200 to the 7200 and windows was so slow!! not to mention how much faster it is for transfering GBs of data.

My Z92U feels way faster than my A6Vc when it comes to anything that requires a bit HDD usage.

I wont go back to 4200!

You'll only notice what you're gained when you try to go back, its like dial up vs braodband. not nice when you downgrade.

Insane