I swear I looked online, but didn't find anything useful. Here's the deal: My newish laptop has being saying the battery was 96% charged, and currently charging, most of the time for weeks. I keep it plugged in all the time. So I just unplugged it, to run the battery down. Does this even make sense? I am going off of old, half-remembered, cordless phone instructions.

I would offer to help you, but the reason I am in laptop buying hell is that my laptop claims it is fully charged, all the time, but won't actually run off the battery. Which was okay, but now the power adapter jack has crapped out again.

So. On to hell.

I cancelled my order with Tiger, 'cause I noticed that a) they had a short warrantee period, and if I bought the extended, it would raise the price to where I could buy an equally nice Sony with a year's warrantee; and b) they told me when I called to make the change that I couldn't ship to a hotel. I should have just lied and said I was an employee.

So then I went direct through Sony; they had some nice, if slightly more expensive, stuff on their clearance pages. I called the guy up to see if I could get a non-profit discount (I can, but it's less than the clearance discount). In the end, I said, fine, let's just buy the clearance item. Guess what? Out of stock!

Great.

Now I'm back to square one, scouring the web. If anyone wants to play along, here's what I'm looking for.

Edited, 'cause I always forget my breaks.

- $750 to $1150, incl. 1 yr parts & service
- P4 2.8 Ghz or PM 1.6 Ghz, not Celeron
- refurb, clearance or demo stock is fine, open box is not
- in order of pref; Sony, Toshiba, Dell. Not Compaq, Gateway, emachines, Systemax, or HP.
- 512 RAM
- 40 to 80 gigs HD
- 15.4 WXGA
- CDRW at minimum, DVD+-RW ideally
- 805.11b-g wireless
- RJ11 & RJ45 ports
- USB at minimum, firewire ideally
- XP Pro, prolly, Office is nice, but not necessary

Oh, and it needs to be able to be shipped 2-3 night to a hotel room. I think I'm giving up hope shortly.

My newish laptop has being saying the battery was 96% charged, and currently charging, most of the time for weeks.

My brother, who is an IT guy, told me that newer batteries never charge to 100% now - supposedly saves battery life. However, mine usually goes to 98 or 99. 96% seems a bit low.

I cancelled my order with Tiger

Good. If you plan on using the laptop unplugged, the Pentium-M based ones are really the way to go. The regular P4's will drain a battery very very quickly, in addition to running hotter than Faith in leather pants *ahem*

I'm posting as a distraction from work, but I'll dig around a little tomorrow.

eta - um, I needed more distraction. Any chance you're willing to compromise on any of those specs? If so, which ones?

Huh. Thanks Stephanie. It's not like I would even notice, except for the "charging" light.

Of course, if I buy a decently cool running laptop, I will have spent $9.95 on a cooling pad (with three fans!) for naught. But I can live with that.

Liese - Looking through Newegg, the resolution is what's going to hurt you. Most P-M based lappies in your price range only support 1024x768 resolution - even on a 15" screen. However, Acer has one that looks like it might qualify (other than brand)

[link]

If you want to look for more models yourself, try Newegg's laptop site:

[link]

Hmm. Looks pretty good.

And yeah, I can compromise. On pretty much everything, though that's what I claim I need. Prolly need to stick pretty hard on the RAM, we've got a good bit of RAM intensive music software. Need the burner, the wireless and the phone jack. Other than that, I'm just sticking up numbers, and mostly desktop replacement numbers at that.

We're hoping to give up the desktop and go to two laptops eventually, so heading that direction.

I did find another refurb on Sony's site that might work for me if it's actually in stock. And I found a Dell refurb that's pretty close, too.

Jessica: If $400 or so isn't out of your budget, the internet seems to be in agreement that the Onkyo S770 Home Theater in a Box is about the best deal for your money. It has the best combination of receiver abilities and speaker quality in that price range, and is a 6.1 system. Features include a normal receiver, not some scary combined DVD player/Reciever thingy, component video switching (so if you have, say, an HDTV tuner and a DVD Player, you can run them both through your receiver to a single high-quality input on your modern TV, and switch the video with the same button as the audio - may not be useful for you now, but might be good in the future), all the decoding things, et cetera.

If you're willing to go up to $800-$900, you can build your own 5.1 system that would sound better. But below that price range, that HTiB is quite nice, and probably easier.

Signed,
Been Doing FAR Too much research into home theaters lately and has decided on a system that will probably be $1400 for the speakers and receiver

ETA: Cnet Review of the S770. Read it, it might tell you some things that make you dislike it. (It's not as pretty as most, for example, and the speakers are rear-ported, meaning they'll need to not be up against the wall for the best sound.)

So I just unplugged it, to run the battery down.

Jesse, IIRC that is only useful with NiCad batteries. NiMH and Lithium batteries don't have the same problems with shallow discharge/frequent recharge.