I kinda sorta upgraded.

[Jain Zar]

Yeah.  My computer was slowly dying on me, becoming harder and harder to turn on every time.  (Looking back it was like this from day 1.  Too bad it wasn't noticable and obvious till AFTER the warranty had expired a year or so later.  Of course the overseas tech support could only repeat this mantra with no other answers.)

Instead of dropping the 100-300 it would probably cost to fix I just decided to go the space saving laptop route.  Don't use a computer for much gaming any more so the whole upgrade deal didn't matter to me.  I just needed to run the games I already had.  Plus the fact my little demigod machine here doesn't even take up the space my monitor did, much less the giant fan ridden beast of a computer itself.

I ended up getting an HP Pavillion on sale. (900 even, with a 50 dollar rebate to send in.)  Athlon 64 3200 Ati Radeon Xpress 200M, 80 gig HD, built in Altec Lansing Speakers, DVD R, and the sweetest wide screen display. (15 1/4" diagonal)

Im pretty happy so far, though getting used to the keyboard will take a bit of time.  (Using my 5 button Intellimouse Optical.  Also have an inexpensive laptop cooling station for it and all the still useful home external components set up.)

Magic Online looks AWESOME in widescreen.  As if it was designed to play better in that aspect ratio.  Tried out a graphics demo from that demo team that made the super tiny FPS demo. (The Popular Demo.  The one with the disco ball head guy.)  Played very smoothly.  Hopefully my games will be happy with it too, as I won't be able to afford more RAM for a few months.  Only Warhammer Dawn of War and Guild Wars are system beaters anyhow.  But considering my old system only had a Radeon 9600 I don't think I will have too much to worry about it.  (Ok, SWG is a hog, but why the hell would I want to play that shitfest again?)

Any advice you fellow laptop users have for me?  Its mostly gonna stay on the computer table, but itll be nice to take it with me when needed.  Too bad it now means I cant afford an iPod Nano any time soon.  (Hope I remember I want the engraving to say "Fuck Communism" like the lighter in Preacher whenever I can get one.)

I also couldn't believe how many laptop systems they had for sale at Staples.  It was like 2 desktops and a small army of lappies.

[schild]

Just get a Dell with a widescreen display. Go to Edealinfo.com for the best coupon engineering this side of a turkish bazaar.

Don't be dismayed when you see you could have gotten a sweet machine with a 24" LCD for about $980.

[Sky]

Any advice you fellow laptop users have for me?

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/

Too bad it now means I cant afford an iPod Nano any time soon.  (Hope I remember I want the engraving to say "Fuck Communism" like the lighter in Preacher whenever I can get one.)

I'm waiting until next year, hopefully those honkin' new flash drives will trickle down to Apple, I'd like at least 16GB in my Nano, 32GB would make me happy. I've come up with about a hundred things to write on it, mostly lyrics about music or freedom, but lots of stupid stuff like "Your Name Here" or "This thing makes me trendy".