Upgrading M1530 hard drive and installing vista

I'm looking to upgrade to a bigger hard drive for my M1530 and would like to have some advice. I'm looking to get one at least 320GB, preferably the bigger the better.

I see a lot of 7200rpm 320GB on sale and I was wondering how noticeable is the difference in speed between the stock 5400rpm and a 7200rpm? I'm satisfied with the speed I get now but if there's a huge difference in speed I might be persuaded to go for a 320GB instead of a 500GB 5400rpm.

Are there any brands/models that's particularly recommended from those who's changed there hard drives?

This is my first time upgrading a laptop so how easy is it to do this?


Also, since I'll have to put Windows Vista when I have the new hard drive, what would be the best way to update to SP1 after installing windows? Would it be to install Windows -> install drives -> update to SP1 or install Windows -> update to SP1 -> install drivers? I'm asking this because I've had no luck installing SP1 currently after multiple attempts and I've given up on installing SP1.

 

There's not really a noticeable difference in speed between a 320GB 7200RPM drive and the 500GB 5400RPM variant. I would recommend the Western Digital Scorpio Blue.

As for installing Vista on your new hard drive, you can avoid doing so by simply cloning your existing your hard drive with Acronis TrueImage.

 

Oops should've been more clear. I'm looking to do a fresh Vista install on the new drive

 

I would intall vista, then drivers, then SP1. I did so by doing it through the online updates. Took a while but it finally got done. The reason for this was the disc I have is several years old since I got my laptop before SP1 and the disk did not have it on it.

 

Well, for me there's been a noticeable speed difference between the original Hitachi / IBM travelstar 5400 RPM drive in my M1330 and now I've installed a 320GB Travelstar but with the faster 7200 RPM and a 16mb cache. Installed the new drive into an external usb sata drive enclosure, used paragon hard drive manager 2009 and used drive copy tools within the program ( A program like Acronis Migrate easy 7 might be an easier choice if you're a newbie with this sort of thing. There's a free full functional trial ). Once a complete duplicate copy was in the new drive, took the old drive out, put the new drive in and rebooted. I'm pleased with the speed increase. It might not be obvious to some, but for me the reaction speed is a lot faster.

Bottom line is it's pretty easy to do a hard drive replacement. The usb sata external enclosure that I purchased came with a screwdriver that allowed me to remove the screws from the Dell hard drive enclosure.

As for installation procedure, DR640SE is right. Vista, then drivers, then SP1.