Hard Drive and Processor Speed Comparisons

As much as I love my Gateway MX7515, the current price for the Dell XPS M170 has really caught my attention. I can't really afford to keep them both, so I am going to sell my MX7515 eventually. Anyways, will I notice a huge difference jumping from the AMD Athlon 64 4000+ 2.6GHz (MX7515) to the Intel Pentium M Processor 760 2GHz (M170)? The 4000+ was the main reason I bought the MX7515, and I know that there will be a slight performance difference, but how much are we talking?

Also, I am currently configuring an M170, and I am deciding between the 60gb 7200rpm hard drive vs. the 120gb 5400rpm hard drive. There is only a $35 difference. I want the best preformance possible, but I also want a big hard drive(I do lots of video editing). How much of a performace boost will there be from 5400rpm to 7200rpm. Will this affect gaming? Thanks

 

Performance increase will be excellent and will affect gaming (loading etc) you can get up to 100gigs if your willing to pay for it.

As for CPU difference not sure but you can also pinmod the PM to get that clock up to 2.6ghz it will probably be a noticeable increase with that mod (and even without it)

 

I'm not sure the move from A64 4000+ to P-M 760 is exactly a "jump". A price jump, yes, performance jump - no, AMD is the faster, as well as the hotter CPU. In oder to notice the difference, however, you will have to strain the CPU continously over long periods of time - say a few hours. Even then difference will be a matter of few minutes, max.

The hard drive upgrade is much more important, as well as RAM amount.
5400 vs 7200 will hardly affect gaming except for load times, which again will not be a huge boost. In gaming, the GPU is the limiting factor and not the CPU or the HDD. Video encoding will benefit from the faster HDD. You may get the faster HDD and later buy a larger with an external enclosure.