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>If you have a lot of RAM, the only time your disk gets hit is during boot up, then to load your normally-used programs and data the first time. Then, everything gets cached (especially with write-behind caching enabled). It's a significant cost for a replacement drive, and to get the old cloned to the new - I'm not sure you'd see enough of a real-world difference to justify going from a 5400 to a 7200.
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>Having said that, laptop drives are plug & play - any machine that will accept a 5400rpm drive will accept an equivalent 7200rpm drive. The one thing you may need to be careful of, especially with budget laptops, is if you want to go with a larger, as well as faster, drive - some BIOSs may not support large drives.
I will probably get either 250 Gb or 160 Gb hard drive. And these, I think, are fairly standard now. At least when you specify a Dell pc you have a choice of sizes and speed on the same processor and BIOS.
"The creative process is nothing but a series of crises." Isaac Bashevis Singer
"My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all." Oscar Wilde
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." W.Somerset Maugham
