Laptop prices and upgrading...

[dwn4crwn]

with the new pentium 4's and 1.0ghz laptops comming out, how much longer do you think we'll have to wait to see drops in laptop pricing?? I'm looking at a Fujitsu 650 pentium III...its around 1300 right now...do you think thats a good price???

Also, I've heard of people replacing processor chips in their laptops in another forum...he went from a 650 to a 800...or so he says...does anyone know where to find this information out?? (If the motherboards in laptops can handle chip upgrades)

Thanks

[paulc]

Newer P3s/Celeron micro-pga2 laptop CPUs are usually upgradable and are available for sale on pricewatch. I will probably upgrade my Celeron 650 when the P3-700 mpga2 comes down in price. I'm not going to mess with it until my laptop warranty expires. I've already upgraded the hard drive from 6GB to 20GB, but that only needed 1 panel access. Same thing with the memory upgrade.

Right now is an OK time to get a laptop, but if you want a good graphics chip in a low end laptop, you'll have to wait. The only GF2Go laptop I know of is the $2400 Toshiba. I have a MobileSavage IX/8MB in mine, which is good performance for the price range (I paid $1400, with an 8x DVD drive built in). If you play games, you'll be disappointed with any chip less than that (Rage Mobility128 and up, GF2Go and SuperSavage IX are all OK).

Laptop memory is cheap. I've seen PC100 SO-DIMMs for $100 on pricewatch. Even 20GB name brand laptop hard drives are under $150. So don't stress if a low end laptop doesn't have enough memory or hard drive space... focus on the CPU speed and screen. Adding or upgrading small things is cheaper to bring a low end laptop up to higher end specs.