futnut

I agree with Amateurstuntman, it'll be better for battery life as well if you go the SSD option and setup a backup and archive schedule to a bigger external disk. I'd personally go for a larger disk than 64GB, 120GB SSD should be fine, leave around 80GB for OS and updates down the road, leaving you with ~30GB to play around with. Laptops generally come with a 5400 RPM HD because of the lower power requirements and therefore extended battery life. Very rarely do you see workstations with anything less than a 7200 RPM because power is less of a concern. 7200 RPM gives you lower read/write l

Kojak, at the risk of sounding patronising (sorry!) have you looked at the event logs? Really we're interested in the Application and System event logs. Have a look at around the time of the stuttering. There is also definitely an AMD/ATI specific log under 'Application and Services log' but I don't know if there is such a thing for NVIDIA, be worth a look. If this is a hardware issue then there is a good chance that the logs will reflect this. I did have a similar issue and as previous posters have mentioned it was down to power, specifically graphics card voltage; I actually had crash