Upgradeability

[Wardawg1001]

I've heard that with notebooks you are usually stuck with a lot of the parts that it comes with, so I'm wondering what parts you generally can upgrade after the fact. I've been shopping around at a lot of sites but I just can't find one that has everything I'm looking for unless they are incredibly expensive, though I have found some really good deals on some notebooks that I would only need to upgrade 1 or 2 parts like the graphics card or HDD, so I'm thinking it would be best to find something on a good sale and just do that. Also, how difficult is it for various part upgrades? Would I be able to swap out the HDD or RAM on my own (I'm not an idiot, but I have no real experience swapping out laptop parts) or would I have to pay someone to do it for me?

One last question, what kind of difference in performance am I looking at for 5400rpm vs 7200rpm hard drive? And what will it affect? Games? Bootup? Program compiling?

EDIT: Another question: Am I going to notice a difference between DDR2-800 and DDR3-1067 on a laptop with, say, 512mb or 1024mb video card and 2.53ghz cpu?

 

[IlllI]

things easy to upgrade
a. ram
b. hard drive
c. processor, but not as easy as the first two

graphics card: generally no, specially not ones with intel integrated graphics, since those are built directly into the mobo

 

[Wardawg1001]

Any insights into the other questions?

 

[mpilchfamily]

Slower HDD will mean slower boot but not by much at all. The slower drive is also cheaper.

Also faster RAM will translate into better performance.

 

[Wardawg1001]

I'm not really that concerned with boot speed. Will it affect anything else? Gaming? Compiling? I may have some ERP systems installed on this computer will it speed up digging through thousands of files of data?

I understand that faster RAM = better performance under ideal circumstances, but I'm concerned that on a lower power machine it wont really affect anything as the speed bottleneck will be somewhere else. I was posting some suggested PC builds with superior processing/ram/HDD speed and even then some people advised against going with the more expensive DDR3 RAM (strictly on the basis of its lack of effect on the system, not a budget thing), I guess I'm wondering if there was any truth to that or not.