Can depend a lot on how much RAM your system has, and what you plan on doing with your laptop. If you have low system RAM (under 1GB XP, 2GB Vista) then the faster hard drive will benefit you more since memory swapping will be faster.
If you are doing things on your laptop that require much hard drive usage, as opposed to just word processing, etc, you will gain from a faster hard drive.
If you are in and out of hibernation a lot on battery then a faster hard drive will benefit you.
7200rpm drives do use a touch more power than a 5400rpm, but that is made up for in faster access and load times, so depending what you are doing, the 7200rpm drive can actually result in longer battery life. Note that a low-quality 5400 rpm drive may still use more power than a higher quality 7200rpm drive.
Also getting a hard drive with a larger cache helps a lot.
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