Should I buy the one with 2.5ghz and the 4gb of Ram and the 320GB Hard drive? Or do you recommend buying the 2.4ghz and 2gb RAM and upgrading it myself? Which would be more cost-efficient? Its a difference of $520
personally I have the 2.4GHz model, and it runs beautifully, I can do everything from hardcore engineering work, or watching 1080p movies...the extra 100Mhz isn't really going to make a BIG difference in MOST tasks, granted these is double the cache, but still... The 320GB hard drive is about $70 for a good quality one on newegg...BUT seriously, I have tons of 720p and 1080p movies, and the between the 250GB internal and a cheap external, I have more than enough room... The 4GB RAM on newegg is $80ish, but it will get cheaper...and a year or so from now once the 4GB modules are cheap, you can easily get 5-6GB for the same price. In all honesty, I have run virtual machines (Win. XP), and still never really needed any more RAM than the standard 2GB! Last, the added graphics memory, well, maybe a few frames in Crysis, but nothing really noticeable... Trust me, I have done everything from basic office to engineering software like MATLAB, to gaming like Call of Duty 4/5 and Crysis...and I have never really felt a need for anything more. Save the $520, and later on, you can upgrade to 500GB and 6GB of RAM for a FRACTION of $520! Good Luck.
what he said. get the stock unless youre really into video editing and 3d work where 100MHz will save you hours on rendering frames. since you dont know which one you should buy, i'm guessing you dont do any of that. just buy the stock and upgrade RAM and HDD as you go along. Maybe you wont even need to upgrade the HDD. I'm still on my stock 250GB 5400RPM w/ windows partition and everything and i still got room to spare.
not in a laptop no. and considering its soldered to the logic board, no. what do you intend on using your laptop for anyway? graphic design, games, powerpoint?
then the 2.4 is more than enough. Unless you do heavy HD video editing, or heavy 3d modeling and animation, you wont even notice the speed bump.
I would buy the 2.4 and get the stuff yourself. a 500gb Drive is $100 at newegg. 4gb of ram is 54.00. The extra processor power is really just 200mhz, which is so small it doesnt matter for you. Ram: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220312 HD http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136314 Free Shipping on both items. Oh and by the way, you can upgrade the processor in many PC laptops. I know my dell has a socket with a removable processor.