Which of these two feature sets are the better deal.

On the dv6500 I can either upgrade from the 7100 to the 7300 or I can go from 80GB to 120GB and get the 12cell battery as opposed to the 6cell.

 

I would recommend the upgrade from T7100 to T7300 rather than the upgrade in HD size, unless you don't have an external HD and dependent on the internal notebook one.

 

Ill be taking my notebook to my college classes as well. I was thinking the 12cell would be nice for that

 

Yeah, I'd go with the T7300 now. You can always upgrade the hard drive and buy another battery later in time. Upgrading the processor would require disassembling the laptop, which is not as easy.

 

Processor for me too. Battery and external hard drives are just so much more flexible.

 

so the extra 2mb worth of cache is worth it over the HD and battery?

 

It will get you further into the future without serious internal upgrades. And yes, the larger cache does appear to help in synthetic benches.

 

well it certainly depends on ur financial situation, if u ever think u cud afford the drive and/or battery at a later date then go for the CPU

but if not then maybe the battery and drive will be more useful to u

bear in mind that if u ever do want to upgrade the CPU, it will be a more harder task and must be professionally done by someone who knows wat theyre doing.

if u dont need it for movie encoding and other CPU intensive tasks then u dont need the faster CPU. word processing, internet, etc.... these dont need a super CPU

 

You guys sound pretty sure, Im not sure if I needed the extra HD space so much but the battery sounds really nice. I guess Santa Rosa is supposed to save me battery anyway.

 

I will be playing games

 

games depend more on graphics card

 

Also is going from basic to premium worth $35. I could probably afford to go down to basic and then add the battery as well.

 

In that case, the graphics card is more important than the cpu. I assume you picked the 8400M GS over the X3100?

 

yes I did.

 

basic is really like the joke of the vista family, it has no real features but the price of a real OS

 

You will lose Aero, Media Center and the native dvd burning app with Basic. Of course your laptop will have HP pre-installed software to cover for the dvd stuff.

 

Isnt windows media center for free?

 

No, it is integrated into Home Premium and Ultimate. Personally, I find it quite useless without a tv tuner anyway.

 

Heres all the features of each

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_02.asp

I think Ill go premium