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.

Sadly, I don't think my living room is anywhere near big enough to justify needing 6 or 7.1 surround-sound. The speakers would be practically on top of each other.

I think I've decided on the Yamaha YHT-150 600-Watt 5.1-Channel Home Theater in a Box. I want to see it in person before I decide, just to make sure the inputs are what I think they are, but so far, it's the best value I've seen.

Whoot! Friend of a friend came through, so I bought a Dell Inspiron that hits pretty much all my reqs, except just cd-burner instead of dvd-burner, but still, all quite good and at $800, way better price-wise than I could do through normal channels.

So yay!