The speed of your hard drive will definitely give you some difference in performance, but how much of a difference depends on the type of task you’re trying to perform. Partly this is because the faster speed will allow the hard drive to spin around to the proper location a bit faster…this is very good for burst-mode operations where you’re retrieving a lot of small chunks of data from various locations around the drive. What may be more of an issue in this case is the interface speed on the drive: older IDE hard drives connected to the motherboard at 66MB/sec, then moved up to 100, then 133, and newer SATA drives can transfer data at 150 or 300 MB/second. So you’ll definitely see a performance boost, but either way it’s probably not going to be a massive boost.

As for changing the speed of your RAM, it’ll only make a real difference if the CPU you have is capable of running at that faster bus speed — some were locked into the slower 100 MHz bus speed, but some could switch between 100 or 133 MHz depending on if the the bus speed times the multiplier equalled the speed of the processor…then you’d be able to do more work in the same amount of time, because the bus could push more data through. If the overall speed of the CPU itself stays the same, you won’t see a massive benefit with this method either — you’ll really get more of a benefit bumping up to the higher frequency and getting a faster processor too. But if your computer supports these tweaks, every little bit can help, so it’s worth trying!