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Laptop Era Dawns

Notebook power--and sales--are rising fast. Wireless networking growth only sweetens the deal. Should your next PC be a laptop?

Carla Thornton

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Hardware: New Upgrade Options Abound

Alienware's Area-51M system with ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 upgrade card.

Alienware's Area-51M system with ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 upgrade card. Photograph: Marc Simon
Upgrading notebooks used to mean adding RAM, or perhaps swapping in a larger hard drive. Now, one company also lets you upgrade graphics, and new drives are bringing near-desktop drive speeds to laptops.

Alienware will sell the first user-installable NVidia Geforce FX 5600 and ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 cards for its heavy-duty Area-51M gaming notebooks. Each includes 128MB of video RAM and will cost around $300.

We tried out this groundbreaking upgrade. It's not entirely elegant, requiring you to uninstall video drivers before taking a screwdriver to a large panel on the bottom of the system. But the large cards are easy to pop in and to get running. Alienware will offer additional cards as the vendors introduce new graphics chips. In informal tests, we didn't see performance differences on standard productivity apps, but we expect more impact on demanding games.

The latest crop of notebook hard drives delivers both extra storage and a speed boost. We tried two such drives, Seagate's 40GB 5400-rpm Momentus ($145) and Hitachi's 60GB 7200-rpm Travelstar 7K60 ($305), replacing the 4200-rpm 5GB IBM Travelstar drive in our two-year-old Dell Inspiron 2500. (Though these rpm figures are like those of desktop drives, overall laptop drive speed is a bit slower due to physical drive size.)

To bypass the chore of backing up data and reinstalling apps, we used Apricorn's $89 (list) EZ Upgrade kit with each new drive. We simply slid the new drive into Apricorn's external enclosure, plugged it into our notebook's USB 1.1 port, and used the bundled software to copy our data--and OS--to the new drive. Ninety minutes later the job was done, and we put the new drive in our laptop.

In our informal tests, the 7200-rpm Hitachi drive did not perform everyday PC chores any faster than Seagate's 5400-rpm Momentus. But both were twice as fast as our old 4200-rpm drive at launching an Excel file, and they performed a search about 25 percent more quickly. Not bad for under 2 hours' work.

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