SupaFly-TNT

Just go to www.pricewatch.com You'll get the cheapest and worst pics on the first page, if your only going for money, thats probably your best bet.

I'd guess around 30 dollars an hour if your just a freelance fairly technical guy. If it sounds low; it's because in the end if your doing easy stuff it shouldn't take you that long and will allow you to get to another site. The rate really depends on how good you are and what you are offering, professionals get around 50 - 60 an hour for onsite calls so you want to keep that in mind.

Are you looking to replace the entire heatsink/fan combo? I think the E15's only have a single fan/heatsink combo unit. It's not like the old inspirons that had two "mini" exhaust fans at the back. For that im not sure where you can get them. Dell might be your best bet in that situation. If your talking "Lap" coolers, I could give you some info on those though.

I haven't heard of any, but keep in mind the desktop card is usually going to come first then the notebook. With the way it is now, whatever is coming out for the desktop group should make it's way to notebooks eventually. They tend to step together with notebooks slightly behind.

Well they will all play current games at lower rez, but as far as being ready for anything coming up in the next say year or two, they will seriously underperform. The 7900 would be your best bet, but I don't think the E15 even has that as an option right now. Look at it this way, your current 9800 will spank a X1400, as it's not really a good card for gaming in general, none of those cards are except the 7900. The 7300 is comprable to the nivida 6200 series. In laptop gaming there aren't many options in the midrange budget right now.

Check out the AIW X1900, has most of the connections ur looking for, then if you need spring for a cheapo card for the ones it doesn't cover. http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/aiw-x1900/index.x?pg=1 or http://www.antaresdigital.com/customer/pro...=312&page=1

All good suggestions, but on the Video Card thing, you can get a X1900 AIW from ATI so if you want the combo card that should do well for your friend. Only thing that may trip you up is if you want HD TV support, then you should get a regular GFX card and then add on the HD TV tuner, still a bit pricey, but your friend appears to have a high budget.

for 900 bucks, I would go with a Dell. You could wait for one of their deals and get a decent performing laptop with a nice GFX card for under 900 bucks. Just bought my mom one with a 7900 GT and 1 gig of ram for about 809$

http://planetbattlefield.gamespy.com/View....ory_select_id=7 Should take ya right there will all the patches you would need! I still play BF and I gotta say that game is the best game ive ever played; even though i still love COD2.

sweet look, thought I hit the wrong site when I first got here.

His HD is not going to affect his game at all, except for loading times. Any modern HD will be adequate. I have a 160gig SATA and I get no performance differences fps or speed wise than I had with my 60gig 7200 rpm drive. When im tearing up in COD my harddrive has very little to do with this.

I really don't think this is hardware related. You should be fine with your setup, possibly buy another 512 of ram and tweak your system. I would wait until PCIE is mainstream and more available (AMD specifically) and then upgrade the mobo and graphics card. It seems like your chasing a problem that won't be fixed with your upgrade. Also, HD's make next to no difference in performance of your games except for loading time. I don't care if you have dual sata 20,000RPM in raid 0 or whatever, if your games thrashing to your HD your gonna get lag.

Looks like your game is fine for your setup. Your graphics card is the problem. Upgrade that. The pixels you have are because you don't have AA on and your rez is 800. Bump everything up and then run the game and take a screenshot even if it's slow and you will probably see it's your graphics card and the settings it supports.

Eh, it took mine almost 12 hours...but it did come

BF Vietnam needs a patch! Simple as that, don't let that be your benchmark. Your card can run it, you'll have to bump down a lot of textures though. But it should be playable, but not likely good. How much System RAM is a factor also.