Planning a Thinkpad upgrade — need advice

Question

I have a Lenovo R61 provided by our college.(2 years old currently)

the current config is

C2D - T5670 1.8Ghz 2GB RAM(DDR 2 667Mhz) 160 HDD

Am planning to upgrade it in Dec this yr, with the following upgrades

4GB RAM(kingston/transcend)

500 GB WD SCORPIO BLACK , Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 or 7K750, or a Seagate Momentus XT

320GB(depending on price and availability)

2 years warranty extension

need to know the following:

1) Will the upgrade give any significant performance benefit?(primary use is developing small apps using VS 2010 and some work on photoshop -- none of them seem to max out the CPU, but spend most of the time on reading from HDD and generally run out of RAM)

2)Will the HDD cause any issues with the laptop(heat,noise,vibration and battery consumption are not an issue)

3) has anyone done a similar upgrade , faced any issues with a similar upgrade or noticed any improvement(or lack of it) in performance

4)Are there any compatibility issues in the above upgrades?

Answer 1

There should be no compatability issues with the above HW, as long as you buy the correct RAM for your machine and the connection type on the HDD is the same, although I'm imagaining they both will be SATA so no problems there.
If you are regularly maxing out your RAM then the RAM upgrade will be beneficial. The Increased Space on the HDD will come in handy as well, I imagine its also a faster RPM than your present HDD so there will be a speed increase here as well. I have upgraded a lot of Laptops from 2GB to 4GB recently as we have rolled out Windows 7 to our user base, it has made a definite difference. I haven;t upgraded the HDD's though sorry so can;t comment on that.

Also when upgrading your warranty I would make them aware that you have modified the unit from its original configuration.