What to spend pennys on???

[Jasp]

Looking at getting a little more out of my laptop with a rough budget of about £100, basically i torn between a new HD for my games to speed the load times up etc or going for a better soundcard and headphones.

Currently the latop has 2XWD2500BEVS drives installed that are not particually fast, was thinking of upgrading to a WD3200BEKT or a Seagate 7200.4 500gb but can't really justify £100 on one drive, question is am i going to notice a difference going for the WD Black 320gb which is around £50. Bearing in mind im upgrading the game HD not the OS one.

Other option is to go for a creative 5.1 external soundcard and a set of Senhiesers 555s running me upto £100 as im currently using the onboard sound and a set of HD201s.

Any thoughts?

[Andeh13]

Iv heard that Intel's Turbo* boost increase battery life by 30+ mins and can boost performance. Aside from that the next best way of boosting performance will prob be a SSD.

*Should add its a type of memory in case people are interested.

[Jasp]

Iv heard that Intel's Turbo boost increase battery life by 30+ mins and can boost performance. Aside from that the next best way of boosting performance will prob be a SSD.

Quite true but a can't jusitfy a huge loss in storage for performance were my games are concered, battery life really is not a issue as this thing weighs 15lbs and is hardly portable lol plus my wireless card eats up the slot turbo memory uses so thats not a option.

[Arimus]

To be honest; I'm not sure you'd gain that much either way... might be better finding something else to spend the £100 - take the misses / gf / so etc out for a slapup meal and earn some credits so you can spend more time gaming without grief

[Jasp]

No misses or GF lol, tbh shouldnt be spending it as im unemployed but it was my Bday money and ill be dammed if its going on bills.

[Arimus]

Which drive is your swap space set to use? I'd consider upgrading your game HDD to a 7200rpm one and then once that's done reallocate the swap space to that drive as well...

[Jasp]

Page file? Tbh not messed around with it, i'd imagine it will be set as the C drive (OS) and OS managed.

[Arimus]

Not sure how much memory you have but if you are playing games I'd suspect you are swapping a fair bit - so speeding up the game disk is only going to improve some aspects of game performance - memory swaping will still be bound by the lowerspeed device.

[Jasp]

4gb running on a 32bit OS so in effect 3071 accoding to task manager. Drive C: is setup as the OS/Recovery/File, D: is installed games only. According to windows i can relocate it or perhaps give each drive its own page file?

[Arimus]

I'd consider, once you upgrade the HDD if you that route, relocating it to the 2nd HDD.

Also when W7 is released you might want to consider upgrading to the 64bit edition (assuming your processor is 64bit) as you can use the full 4GB then... with a 32bit os you only get around 3GB of the 4GB address space useable.