RPM Hard Drive... important?

[chepeps]

Hello,

After weeks of looking around and thinking about buying Dell I just found an ASUS laptop that seems to be better and cheaper ! I am ready to buy but I just realized that the hard drive was slower than most (5400 RPM instead of 7200).

Below are the key specs:
- core i7 720QM
- ATI Radeon HD 5730
- 4 Go DDR3 memory
- 640 Go SATA (5400 t/mn) hard drive
- 17'3 screen
- no blue-ray !

All this for around $1,200 (around because the price is in euro).

I believe it is quite a good deal but I am worried about the "slow" hard drive. I have no idea about the impact it would have (hardly noticeable or major flaw ?)

Thanks in advance for your expert advice !

 

[frozenlead]

it's noticeable, but not that bad, really. You'll really only be able to tell the difference if you've been using a fast desktop for a while. If you don't do many hard disk intensive things, then you'll only notice the slowness during boot.

 

[chepeps]

Thanks for your quick and helpful answer !

So, when running programmes (games, for instance ! ), I should not notice the difference ?

I am going for this one because, within my price range and in the 17' category, it offers the best combo CPU-GPU that I could found... but I don't want to be fooled by this and realize that maybe a slightly "worse" GPU with a "normal" hard drive would actually have been better (my current computer is so slow to boot that I am not worried about getting frustrated because of the booting time !) But I tend to play games more intensive on the calculations/database than on the graphis (management/strategy games).