A faster HD will give you a true speed increase. You can go to barefeats.com and xlr8yourmac.com to to check the benchmarks on the various HDs. On the other hand, the HD in all of the new notebooks is NOT user installable. You could void your warranty if you replace the HD yourself. If you get an Apple Service Provider to install it, Apple's position isn't clear yet. One view is that everything except the HD is still under Applecare. Another view, expressed by an Apple tech at an Apple Store, is that "Apple doesn't support that." What does that mean? Well, you might have to have the original HD put back in, because otherwise Apple might refuse to work on it. Apple's position isn't clear, yet.
Everybody's wondering about the effect of faster HDs on battery life, which by all accounts isn't that great in the new notebooks. Also, nobody likes a hot notebook, but the effect of a faster HD isn't clear because the power consumption while running is approx the same. It's the startup power consumption that's higher (eg generating heat). Well, Jaguar doesn't spin the HD down hardly at all.
RAM depends on what you're doing: If you're just using email, a webbrowser, word processor, spreadsheet, itunes and maybe Palm PDA, then you can get by with 384 or 512 MB RAM without much of a pageout penalty. NOTE: That may change with Panther.
If you keep Classic open, you'll benefit from more RAM. Likewise, video and photo software demands more RAM.
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