I've searched through here and while there is good info I haven't come across this info. I've run a Toshiba 5100 for almost 3 years and it's starting to struggle(p4-1.7, 512 ddr ram, 64 meg geforce 440go and a year ago upped the hd upped to one running at 5400 rpm from 4200). The difference in performance by the hd upgrade was surprising.Anyway the time has come to replace it and is anyone running a dell xps with the ati9800 256meg and 2 gigs of ram?Or the newly released hp zd8000 with the pci video card?- alieanware 7700?- others?Thanks for any response. I am on the road for up to half the year so the laptop makes sense for me. I don't have a desktop pc anymore since the laptops are so powerful. I've found by buying as much performance as you can at initial purchase (it's just about imposible to upgrade these things once you have them) you'll get the longest lifespan out of them.

HiI am in a similar position to you and a notebook was the only really viable solution. I purchased the Acer Ferrari and I am now very satisfied with it. Unfortunately its bright Red and draws attention to itself which is not always what you want, but it certainly performs from an FS perspective.It has the AMD Mobile Athlon 64 - 3000 CPU and an ATI Radeon 9700 vid card. The downside is that Acer supply only 512mb ram and use both slots (using 2 x 256mb SODIMM cards). That beats me, because to upgrade to 1meg of ram you have to replace both SODIMM's and that involves removing the keyboard - go figure. The other surpise is the hard disk. It is supplied with an 80gig disk (that's good) but Acer have selected a Hitachi 4200rpm disk!!! I guess the person who spec'd this "ferrari" wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer.So after installing the memory and a 2.5" Hitachi 60gig 7200rpm drive I now have a notebook that performs like a half decent desktop and runs FS9 really well. The PMDG737-800 generates frame rates between 40 and 70 over most default scenery and between 25-30 on the ground at the default San Fran with sliders all well to the right including 3D clouds - all from the VC. That is without any specific performence tuning.The hard disk is interesting. Hitachi produce a tool to adjust the Advanced Power Management on their disks. In its default state, these 2.5" notebook disks seem to be set midway between full speed and battery conservation mode. This utility lets you set the disk for full speed access (at the cost of battery usage) but the difference is noticable. Terrain texture loads faster.Hope that helps.

Mike, Thanks for the info. Still in the hunt for the next machine. There's some interesting selections available. All the best. Dave