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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Michael Morris" data-source="post: 2172513" data-attributes="member: 87">My current system rang up at $1000 even, and $1000 - $1200 is the sweet range for laptops. I'd save up for that.Some other things also to keep in mind:1) Upgrading hard drives on laptops is trickier since you need special cables (you can't just put both drives on the IDE cable and ghost one to the other.2) Laptops are not as upgradable as desktops. You can up the memory, the hard drive, and maybe the CPU, and that's it.3) SODIMM memory modules, which are what is used in most laptops, retail at about $100 more than comparable DIMM modules in most desktops.4) Try to never fully discharge your battery - every time you do you reduce it's total capacity by about 10% to 20%. Use AC Power when possible, keeping battery sessions to a minimum.5) Get a unit with WiFi preinstalled - it's becoming standard in many areas and most laptops have internal WiFi. My unit has a WiFi PCI card, but that's vulnerable to getting tagged and damaged.6) If you have broadband at your home, strongly consider changing over to a wireless router when you get the laptop.  The freedom to move the laptop to any room of your house to work on things is work the expense.7) If you ever drop it hard and it turns on a beeps at you, open the memory bay and make sure the SODIMM modules are still seated properly. Of the internal components that can be knocked loose, that's the most likely.And finally, since it hasn't been mentioned yet I'll chime in for my brand - Toshiba's Satellite.  I've put this little box through hell - broken it's outer case in two places.  After 2 years the backlight to it's monitor failed - that's the only real problem it gave me that could be called a manufacturer thought (I dropped it at Gencon and knocked a memory card out of socket, but was too dumb to check for that).For the record, I'm running a 1.4 ghz with 1 GB RAM, 100 Gig HD (60 GB avail to Windows, 30 to Linux, 10 shared) running Win XP Pro and Red Hat Linux 9</blockquote>

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