HP dv9500 questions-first post!

Hi all, this is my first post here. For the past two years, I have been the proud owner of an hp dv9575nr notebook (specs HERE). It has served me very well, but I am at the point where I am comfortably out of warranty and interested in some upgrades/modifications. Some of these ideas I am throwing around probably aren't feasible, but I would like some input from some of you guys who know more than me on the subject. Earlier this afternoon, I replaced a dying noisy fan assembly with the aid of the HP service manual, so I am confident in my ability to install pretty much anything without much trouble.

The first thing I am looking at is a significant increase in storage capacity. The laptop came with 2 120 gb hard drives which, at the time of purchase, I thought I would never come close to filling up haha. Well, with the aid of a lightning fast internet connection at college I have amassed a quite large media collection. The setup now is I have my videos (almost 300gb) and my school documents stored on a 500gb WD external hard drive. I would like to have enough room on the internal storage to keep this stuff on, because sometimes the usb interface is sluggish and video quality suffers as a result. My 2nd hard drive currently houses my music library (80gb of 320kbps MP3's) and nothing else. What I would like to do is install a 7200rpm 250gb drive in slot #1, I'm thinking about This WD Scorpio Drive. I want to be able to house all of my documents and music on the first drive, and still have a lot of headroom while upgrading to a 7200rpm drive. For slot #2 I'm debating between a 500gb 7200rpm and a 640gb 5400 rpm. I would like to have the extra room of the 640gb drive, but the speed and cheaper price of the 500gb have me leaning that way. I'd like some opinions on this problem. I know this much storage is a bit overkill, but if I'm going to upgrade my hard drives, I'm going to upgrade. Another option would be to keep the #1 drive I have now and just getting that 640gb for slot #2, and keeping music and videos on the same drive.

I want to upgrade the memory in my computer, and now that I'm running 64bit Windows again I would like to move up to 4gb. I almost pulled the trigger on some corsair ram a few months ago, but hesitated, and now prices have shot through the roof. Do you guys think the prices are going to come back down after the market stabilizes a bit more, or am I just going to have to pay $80 for memory? If prices stay up that might be the difference between me getting it or not.

The last thing I'm wondering about is probably just a far fetched idea that would never work. I have always been disappointed that a computer this nice and expensive only runs at 1440x900 resolution. Several of my friends have other brand computers that aren't nearly this nice that run at 1920x1200. If I were to buy a replacement 17" lcd screen that was designed to run at that resolution, something like THIS, or another 17" WUXA panel, is there any way that I could make that work properly? I have a pretty stout graphics card by notebook standards, but I don't know if this would even be worth messing with.

Thanks in advance guys, I look forward to learning and sharing here in the future.