I'm toying with the idea to start replacing some of the hardware on my laptop, maybe even software if I feel like it.

Currently, my laptop is - to quote from friends - the slowest they've seen. They claim that even dragging the mouse across the screen showed a lag in the computer's speed.

I then started the disk cleaning, defragmentation, and moved surprisingly old and unused files to an external hard drive. I had cleared up the computer to get it from a meagre 7% to 22% free disk space.

I'm not really happy about that, though. The computer still lagged.

What would happen if I replaced my laptop's hard disk from 40GB to something more, say, 120GB (the normal laptop storage space, at least for now)?

Then there was the problem of my DVD RW drive. It's a zombie, really - you can't operate it because it's dead, yet it keeps popping out whenever it wants to and whenever I don't need it. It can't read discs, so it's spoilt. That, I will have to replace, but the question was how I was going to do so. I'm not even earning my own income and asking from my parents would be too much to ask for. Then again, I haven't started searching for places that sold these optical drives and scout for a good price. Hmm.

And my webcam died. I never liked it in the first place, but I just got Skype. I hope that the warranty will not only fix my webcam, but get me a better camera. The video quality's grainy and sucked, so I didn't miss it much. However, if that was one of the sole reasons why I got this laptop - it was the first in the market with an in-built webcam and coupled with Centrino Duo -, I would be cheating myself to leave it dead. The microphone that came with it, however, works fine - for now.

As for software, I'm wondering if I should make the switch from XP to Vista, or just get the theme pack that makes it look like Vista. My mother's earnest on getting the Microsoft Office Professional Plus, which would be great for my future schoolwork but detrimental to my very-limited hard disk space.

If this is all too much of a hassle, I'm wondering why can't I just get a new laptop? *head-desk*