Replacing Laptop HDD

I have a four-year old HP pavilion that is hanging in there pretty well I upgraded it last year to it's max of 1 GB memory; but, I keep running up against the limit of it's OEM HDD of 40 GB.

I have looked into replacing it, and have found reasonable prices for 80- 100 GB ATA laptop drives ($80-$150), so I'm leaning towards lengthening it's lifespan by buying and installing a new one.

My question is this: the OEM is a 5400 rpm drive; I've found I can upgrade to a 7200 rpm drive....will that have any significant effect on:

1) heat production under the hood

2) stressing the power supply (which I can't/won't replace (for obvious reasons).

Thanks in advance for any insights.

Have a great Holiday.

Cliff

How hot does it get now? If the laptop itself is rated for a 7200 drive then it may not make too much difference but I've seen laptops put on the sunny side of the desk start getting errors because of the heat so go with the gut on heat I say.

Same on the power situation really but if it's got the newer energy start type of bios to support standby and such then I wouldn't worry unless you use it more as a desktop system than an on the go system.

If the disk is just for data, you could also buy a USB harddisk. In that way you don't have to fiddle with anything and you can use it on any pc. Drawback is offcourse that it will be external, so another package to carry around.

Over the long weekend I got a chance to go to MicroCenter here near Philadelphia- St. David's, to be exact- where they are having a 25% off orange -tagged (reduced) price items through the end of July. I found an 80GB 5400 drive w/8 MB buffer, which, when all the discounts were taken, dropped to about $100...so I nabbed it.

I need to read up on the transfer procedures, but it even came with an EZ Gig program to do the formatting and transfer.