Hi, I'm looking to upgrade laptops harddrive from the 5400rpm to 7200rpm. Anyone done this before? Any noticeable gains in performance on a Celeron 1.6M? I already got a quote from http://www.rescuetechusa.com that they will do it for $130. Thanks, George

Well I upgraded my original mac powerbook drive which I believe ran around 4300rpm to 7200rpm and it's definitely noticeable!
And yeah if your not comfortable with tiny parts get someone to do it for you since I didn't think the drive would be so small and it was a pain to replace and had me sweating. I paid about $80 for a new 60gig replacement. Make sure you get a seagate with 5year warranty for peace of mind.

I upgraded from a 60GB to a 120GB hard drive (same speed, 5400 rpm). It was really easy to do. I got the drive from www.newegg.com and installed it myself; it took less than 10 minutes to do.

To replace the drive, I just removed two screws, slid out the drive slot, removed two more screws and the connector, put the new drive in with the two screws and the connector, slid the entire thing back into the laptop, and put in the final two screws. It's that easy. The only 'small parts' were the screws.

Switching to a faster hard drive might drain batteries faster; it could take more power to make the drive spin faster. It might not be a noticeable difference, though.

Newegg sells a 60GB 7200rpm drive for $73 up to a 100GB 7200rpm drive for $110.

I also switched out my original 40GB hard drive for a 120GB one recently. Extremely easy - just a couple of screws and nothing else.

If you're concerned about battery life, look up the specifications for your current hard drive and for the ones you're looking at and compare how much power they use. By just searching for the hard drive model I was able to easily find specifications that listed this information.