8gb RAM or 7200 rpm HDD

Hello,

I am looking to upgrade my late 2009 MacBook Pro I currently have 4gb of Ram with a 5400 HDD. I am looking at either getting 8gb RAM or a 7200rpm drive but don't know which. I was hoping you guys could help me make a decision. My computer gets noticeably slow when I run vmware fusion with 64bit windows 7. I like to use safari at the same time but it gets very slow and I only have about 470mb of RAM free. I also like to use Final Cut Pro X and this gets slow also, sometimes a few minutes of the spinning beach ball.

So basically 8gb RAM or 7200 HDD? Thanks!

For the situation you've described - RAM will give you the better performance improvement.

Okay, thank you.

Id go with the RAM too. I don't know if you'll notice a huge performance gain in the HDD. I would recommend going with an SSD

Ok cool. I think I'm going to upgrade RAM then. SSD isn't in the budget right know.

AlexsMacBookPro said:

Ok cool. I think I'm going to upgrade RAM then. SSD isn't in the budget right know.

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The SSD won't give you the performance increase you're looking for under the circumstances you've described anyway. The RAM is the right choice to improve your Virtual machine performance.