Which would make the biggest performance difference. Upgrading to the 3ghz HT CPU or upgrading the HDD from 4200 to 5400?
Upgrading the HDD speed. The 4200rpm drives were, for the most part, phased out circa 2001 in favor of the 5400rpm low-standard and the 7200rpm hi-standard. A couple points to note about that though: if you're concerned about the battery life, a slower spinning drive will give you a longer battery life.... of course if you're considering a 3Ghz chip that prolly wont be your main concern. The second, equally important thing to note is that the faster the drive the more heat it generates and with a laptop, they are very sensitive to heat as far as performance goes
I would be using my laptop for Recording Audio and Video
You'll want the 5400rpm
the 2.8 is regular and the 3.0 is Hyper Treading. any performance difference there or stick with the Upgraded HDD?
No. If you're going to be doing serious A/V stuff you wont be running half a dozen thing simultaneously so HT doesnt have an advantage there. Besides, the HT only really kicks in if (a) the programs were written to take advantage of them and (b) the HT only really gives advantages if the threads are really radically different which for A/V tasks arent (in general)
Should I stick with the P4 or would a Celeron be ok? I have heard to stay away from the P4M because I guess there not as fast or something.
Celeron's are a very slow, budget variant of the "full" P4 line. The P4M you should stay away from because they are the mobile versions of the now aging NorthwoodA line
The 64 bit version basically isn't a whole lot faster
I'd contest that. Two AMD chips, both 2.2Ghz, the 64bit one is far advanced (especially when it comes to A/V stuffos where 64bit support is actually viable)
I'm not much of an Intel guy, but I don't think hyper-threading and the regular pentium is much different in speed. could someone back me up OR correct me on this? I'd really like to know.
For most people you are correct as the advantage is mostly "on paper". Like I said above, HT kicks in when you are running multiple (although it petters out after two) CPU intensive threads which are really different (i.e., running UT2004 and encoding with Premier). Of course, if you're doing something like playing a game of UT or encoding with Premier, you wont be multitasking like that anyways. Also, the programs have to be written to take advantage of that which realistically has only started to spawn in the last few months.
What about P4 VS Celeron. Or Or P4M are the Mobile Processors any good performance wise or should I stick with the "Real" Processors?
P4s have a minimum of 512K of L2 cache. Celerons have 128K. Think of that as 512 "units" of Nitrous for a car versus 128 units of nitrous.
Stick with the "Real" processors. mobile processors don't ever seem to be what they are cracked up to be.
Unless you're thinking the A64 or the P4EE, people should be going mobile chips for mobile platforms because (a) lower voltages = lower terms, more OC, more battery life and (b) it's designed for mobility and thus will tolerate fluctuating power much better and (c) chips like the Centrino2003 will devastate their "full" counterparts, clock for clock, watt for watt or ºC for ºC or even in battery life. If you are considering a Centrino (which would probably be the route i'd reccomend), grab a Centrino2004 -- those chips put their 2003 counterparts to shame in every category from performance to battery life.
Overall Reccomendation
-Low Budget: get AMD XP-M
-Medium Budget: Centrino
-Higher budgets: A64s or P4EE (actually A64s can be had for $1500USD so i dunno if you call that high budget or not)
