I'd take the video upgrade over the processor upgrade. I'm not sure that you'll see a huge difference in current downloaded HD video, but who knows what new video codecs are around the corner that may be helped.

They both come together. I'm wondering if it's worth paying the extra $250 for it or not.

Oh god, I'm dropping off my laptop to go to the Computer Hospital today. I'm going to die from the withdrawal.

If you can imagine ever doing any video editing, you'll want the video upgrade.

What is the video upgrade from? If the GPU doesn't add any extra hardware for decoding HD video, then I don't know what it'll get you for what you're doing.

Can video editing use the dedicated video memory for anything? For 3D rendering, sure, but for basic video editing would it add anything? Maybe it can use it in some way I don't know about. If you don't use the memory for anything but frame buffering, I don't see it making a huge difference for regular usage.

Can video editing use the dedicated video memory for anything?

I know Final Cut Studio won't even install unless you have at least 128MB of VRAM, and certain types of rendering require 512MB of VRAM.

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It's between "NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics" and "NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 256MB"

I don't aspire to video editing, just copious playback.

I know Final Cut Studio won't even install unless you have at least 128MB of VRAM, and certain types of rendering require 512MB of VRAM.

And they require ATI and NVIDIA chipsets too, I guess they must stuff things into that high bandwidth memory. I stand corrected, but I still don't think it'll matter for casual video editing. FCS sounds more like professional stuff.

You're not going to get any extra features going from 9400 to 9600 GT, you're going to get far better 3D performance. You'll use some system memory for video, but in most cases it's not going to be much. You don't need a lot for framebuffering a display, the most common usage is storing textures for 3D where it has to blast textures real-time from that high bandwidth memory.

All my imagery is stills, and most of that is still done on my PC. I think I'll go for the 2.53GHz processor with the lesser video. I got no 3D going on.

Thanks for the input.

Is there a way to import messages from Outlook to Outlook Express? I am trying to save e-mails from work that are not entirely business-related in my personal e-mail at home. But I don't know if OE will recognize the files. I would be using Outlook at home, but when I tried to import my old OE files into Outlook, it changed all the "received" dates to the date of import (maybe it just did that for the sent mail, but it was still annoying).