Macbook Pro 15 - Configuration help

So my girlfriend's parents want to get her a new apple laptop after they accidentally broke her old laptop.

I've been given the task to pick one out and given a budget of $1900..

My gf does a lot of graphic work and is used to a fairly old dell 2.0GHz Core Duo XPS latop (4gb, 320GB 7200 RPM HD).

Now, my gf has used macs before and loves them. She also loves high-res screens, so I'm definitely going with that...

Basically that hits the budget limit of 1900....

Now I'm wondering if it would be wise to be stuck with the 500GB 5400 RPM hard disk.

Would that make the MBP seem sluggish? I'd hate for her to get this new laptop and have it seem slow.

Would it be a signficant difference in upgrading to either the 750GB 5400 RPM or the 500GB 7200 RPM hard disks?

 

how much graphics work and does she run alot of filters or effects?. a FAST 7200 RPM drive I would call a necessity but pls remember 5400/7200 means little. some 5400's are as fast as some 7200's and some 7200's are SLOWER.

side note .... do the drive later on your own, you can get a faster drive cheaper upgrading it yourself. neither of Apples drives ( 5400 or 7200 ) I would call great performers.

 

I just did something like this for my girlfriend, though her parents couldn't swing the nicer 15" model, which I think would have been much better. And twice as much $$$...

Since she also does graphic design type things, I upgraded the RAM for her first. It'll run you about $70 to do that if you're comfortable buying and installing RAM yourself, and according to Apple it doesn't void the warranty.

On the hard drive, you should factor in that the upgrade price Apple is charging you there is also absurd, and it's another component you can replace yourself if you don't mind giving it a couple of hours of your time.

You could get something like one of these two:
Newegg.com - Western Digital Scorpio Black WD5000BEKT 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive
Newegg.com - Western Digital Scorpio Black WD7500BPKT 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

And use the drive that comes with the laptop as an external drive.

In my opinion, the difference between 4GB and 8GB is going to be significant for design work, while 5400RPM to 7200RPM will be incremental - maybe a 10-15% improvement in disk speed. Modern 5400 RPM drives are actually quite decent. The 13 MBP I just received for my girlfriend has a Hitachi 5K500.B, which is a solid drive. In fact, I just "downgraded" the 7200RPM Scorpio Black I put in my x120e to the slower factory drive (also a 5K500.B) because it's quieter, lower power, and vibrates a lot less.

If it were me, I would wait to upgrade the hard drive until you can afford an SSD, which will be closer to a 10x improvement over either drive. OS X does a pretty good job of hiding disk I/O from the user anyway - Windows isn't quite as good at that.