Lenovo 3000 n100 upgrade

I am considering the purchase of an n100 on Black Friday sale at Office Depot. I would want to upgrade immediately...sell original 80gb w/XP Home OS HD on ebay and replace it with 120 or 160 GB (must be SATA I guess). I have had good luck with Toshiba notebook HD's but if someone else has another suggestion, I can listen. I think that I would just install the new drive and do a low level format, then install my own XP and upgrade drivers from the Lenovo site.

Since laptop comes Home and I would install Pro, would there be a driver issues with downloads for my model? Should I pick up the drivers somewhere else? Can I install the Thinkpad utilities/drivers/software on the new HD?

Also would want upgrade memory from 512 to 1GB or 2GB of DDR2 (anyone have favorite brand)

Would probably go the Pricewatch/Newegg route for the upgrades

Guess that this would kill the warranty

Of course, I can just pay an extra $225 for an upgraded laptop but I can get more for less if I do it myself.

Open to suggestions

Thanks

 

I have been using the 100GB Seagate 7200.1 7200RPM drive on my R60. It is near silent as far as I can tell. Plus its performance is for all practical purposes identical to the Hitachi 7K100 as far as I can tell. I would suggest burning off the recovery DVDs before you eBay it so you can re-install the OS when you sell your notebook which will happen at some point. The drivers for the n100 will be the same whether you use XP Home or Pro. You can punch in your machine type on Lenovo's site and get all the drivers for your notebook. Hard drives and memory are considered user upgradeable parts by Lenovo. Upgrading them will not void the warranty. Good Luck.

 

ZaZ, does it runs hot compare to previous 5400RPM drive or even better comparison Hitachi 7k100?

 

I haven't noticed any extra heat, but the R60 is a bit thicker than most.

 

Thank you very much