looks like a really nice rig. I forwarded it to him. he'll have to build it himself though, i'm afraid if i do it i'll end of keeping it...

It just occurred to me that he may not have run standard maintenance on the laptop. I'll see if i can get my hands on it and see how fragged the HD is. and run disk cleanup.

I tried to open up my laptop but the screws were in too tight and very small. I was afraid of stripping them. I almost need an eye glass scredriver with a lever arm to get these things out. even opening up the ram cover is a PITA. I'll have to see if i can find something more suitable to open it up. next time i'm in wal-mart or fry's

The screws are definitely a PITA. You need a magnetic screwdriver to pick them up when you drop them. All minute and with really strange heads.

I did another upgrade on my laptop and was absloutely blown away with the results. I bought a 7200 RPM SATA 150 100GB HDD with 16MB of cache to replace my 5400 RPM 8MB cache drive. I went SATA 150 because 300 is almost irrelevant and the Egg didn't have any 300's with 16MB cache. My expectations were a slight increases in load times but nothing spectacular.

HS, this drive blew me away. It is like a new notebook. Everything is much faster and i mean like 25% to 50% faster. I can only equate it to a system with 60 processes running and 256MB of RAM, suddenly having 1GB of RAM to work with. Things just flash up on the screen. Word loads in 2 seconds. I can't believe how much of a bottleneck the HDD was and I never expected such a profound increase in performance.

I also bought a little Apricorn external enclosure for the 2.5" drive i pulled. This thing is outstanding as well. Flick a switch and the drive tray pops out and it does both SATA and PATA. As with all Apricorn gear it is very well made and it works like a champ and is all aluminum to boot.

So I am up to $780 on this laptop now but I guarantee it runs as fast or faster than any $1200 or $1300 laptop. When the Penryns drop in price I'll stick one in here as well.