while the difference is minimal, it is noticeable. And 95% of laptops in the $1000 range are 7200rpm standard anyway.
The one i linked before is $1300 but its got more value than the 1100 one. It has blu ray instead of dvd, a slightly faster chip, better screen resolution, 9 cell battery vs 6 cell battery. If you are a movie watcher, spend the extra bucks to get a bluray and a better screen!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152099
Both of those seem decent. Bluray and nicer resolution screen would be worth $200 to me. Up to you though 
We started out finding $800 laptops you realize… and now it’s up $500+ more 
That always happens with me too… it’s hard to buy a medium duty laptop when you know it can be better…
haha yeah. I’m not really sold on bluray too much though. if im going to be watching a bluray movie, id prefer to just watch it on a TV. bluray on a laptop isnt very critical to me at all. im still unsure how i want to proceed with this anyways, since I do want to upgrade my desktop in the fall sometime when windows 7 comes out. thats kind of why i was only looking for a midrange laptop to begin with. i’ll just have to keep looking around i suppose and see what i can come up with. the ones linked above are definitely some of the front runners though 
Well, HP has a 30% off coupon code and I managed to put together a pretty nice system using the HD18X platform. It has…
Vista 64bit premium
Core2duo p8700 @ 2.53ghz
4gb ddr3 ram
geforce gt130m 1gb
320gb hdd
bluray/lightscribe burner
huge ass 18" screen
comes to a little over 1500 bucks and thats with a 2 years total coverage warranty with the accidental damage. any thoughts? some possible changes would be upping the cpu to a t9550, but id have to drop the card down to a 9600m gt and change the memory to ddr2 for the same price. doesnt seem like a good idea to me.
If you’re happy with it, thats all well and good. But I never understood anything over 15.4’’ for a laptop. Defeats the purpose of it. Unless its never leaving your desk…but its a laptop. Needs to be mobile!
And you wont notice a diff between ddr2 800 and ddr3 1066. Also, the gt130m isnt tons better than the 9600mgt fyi. Here are the specs.
The extra ram of the gt130 will be nice for your high res screen though.
Tough call. Both options are decent.
It’s looking more and more like it would be a desktop replacement type thing here. I wouldn’t really be all that mobile with it outside of going over friend’s places and stuff. And yea I compared the graphic cards, the major difference was the extra 512 mb of ram on the gt130. I was messing around with the hd16x customization as well, and I couldn’t really come up with something better for the same price. Especially considering the extra 2" of screen size. I’m so indecisive right now about this haha.
In fact, I just built a computer of almost the same specs (a little less powerful) with the HD16x platform and it was actually more.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220529
similar…cheaper.