Pulling the trigger on a M675XL

RickinHouston,

The questions you ask are good, but there are no real good answers. Without insider information from Gateway and the other vendors, it is very difficult to know for sure the timing of upgrades, price changes, etc. A purchase decision has to be made on your own priorities - how soon you need the machine (remember, any new machines will have long ship dates when they are first announced) and if the current machines fully meet your needs.

My own opinion is the M675 is still a very good buy for people that need a large screen desktop replacement notebook. It has been available since early November, and in recent weeks some components have been changed out (80GB hard drive and 1GB RAM are now standard on the M675XL, unlike when I bought it, and you can get a 4X DVD writer now by working with them.)

Both ATI and NVidia have released new mobile graphics chips, so in the coming weeks we will be seeing new laptop platforms with these new chips. It's pretty clear that Dell and other laptop vendors, along with Gateway, will incorporate these chips in their next refreshes. Will they make a dramatic difference? It doesn't sound like it per the current reviews at Anandtech (http://www.anandtech.com/) and Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/).

At this point, you have much deeper wells of information than I did when I initially purchased my M675. Having had several previous Dell laptops, but finding (at the time, and this is still true as of today) that Dell did not have a 17" notebook, and was going through some quality issues with the 8600 laptop that worried me (now resolved well, I hear) I tried the Gateway. There was, at the time I ordered, one review of it, and it was a flawed review by an apparently hurried reviewer. They were not available in the stores then. Now there are lots of people posting their feedback and there are plenty of reviews now, as well as available machines to look at in stores.

I haven't looked back at my purchase, and everyone that has tried out my machine has been extremely impressed, whether I boot up Windows XP or Linux on it. It's a winner in my eyes.

The added hard drive goes where the 6-in-1 reader is. They supply a cable for the 6-in-1 reader, so if you elect to replace it with a hard drive, you can still use it by plugging the cable into one of the available USB ports.

I chose to get an external USB 2.0 drive, though, since I just needed it for archival purposes. I did not want to accidently end up carrying the archival drive with me then losing both if the machine was stolen