Acer Aspire AS7720-6604 Upgrade Suggestions

Okay, my Aspire AS7720-6604 is going to be arriving in the mail tomorrow from the egg. I am seriously considering doing some changes right from the start. Below are the factory specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo T8100(2.10GHz)
17.0" Wide XGA+
3GB Memory DDR2 667
320GB HDD 5400rpm
DVD Super Multi
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 512 MB Dedicated DDR2

I have several questions (not answered fully or partially be customer reviews) below that I would really appreciate anyone's input on.

Question 1:
Can this laptop handle 4 GB of DDR2?

Question 2:
Can this laptop handle Dual Channel RAM?

Question 3:
Replacing the 2x160GB 5400 RPM HDDs with 7200 RPM HDDs should work fine, correct?

Question 4:
Does it seem possible to replace the included DVD+/-RW with a BlueRay DVD and would it even be necessary?

Question 5:
Can the Core 2 Duo be replaced with any other Core 2 Duo Txxxx mobile processor or is there a limit?

Question 6:
This comes with Windows Vista Ultimate...which I am not at all excited about...I want to put Windows XP Pro on but others who've bought this computer have cited performance problems with it and windows XP. So, provided I HAVE to keep Vista I'm probably downgrading to Home Premium. So, will Home Premium 64-bit be okay for gaming? (And has anyone else had success running XP on this lapper by chance?) And yes, I am aware that going back to a 32 bit OS will limit my max RAM useage to 3GB even if I have 4 installed. Having a video card with dedicated 512 MB should offset the loss.

Question 7:
I forgot

Any help in these matters would be greatly appreciated. I have read a generic 7720 Series manual online but it wasn't helpful with all of the above questions so I am turning to the forums in hopes of finding real answers. I sure don't want to try to get those answers from a tech support line.

Thanks in advance and I'll be looking forward to all of your responses.

Thanks for your replies guys. I forgot to ask if the board will support DDR2-800 or if DDR2-667 is as high as it will go. Guess I could just look that info up on Intel's website under the chipset section or something.

I am currently in the process of creating factory restore DVDs as I write this since, as I expected, I can't stand Vista Ultimate x64 for gaming...way to jittery and the framerates are pathetic. No surprise there. Not to mention the very frequent involuntary actions that my characters do @ no warning and for no reason at all (like playing CoD4 and all of the sudden the guy starts strafing and sprinting for no reason, then he'll lug a grenade right into the middle of a group of friendlies...not a cool thing to do by thew way. Or I'll be playing WoW and my Mage will start hurling a fireball at something out of the blue or start strafing also). So as a mildly serious gamer this OS won't work.

Gonna try WinXP Pro and if that don't pan out I'll try WinVista 32-bit Home Premium since a couple of other people reported having success with installing it and liking it on this laptop a lot better.

BTW overall I really like the Laptop and the OS is great for doing everything except gaming so far. Maybe in the future they'll get it worked out but for now I can definitely recommend all gamers to stay away from that OS.

Saugen48,

Yeah I found that out the hard way. I actually found a work around for the windows XP SATA drivers today while surfing forums. I entered the laptop BIOS and changed the SATA mode to IDE. TRhe only problem is now that I have Windows XP installed, THE OS only sees 137 GB instead of the actual 320 that's there. I'm gonna have to figure this one out.

Also I had to find a modded .inf file for the nVidia GeForce 8600M GT video card drivers because there's no factory windows XP drivers for this card (nVidia's website and Acer's website both only offer drivers for vista on this video card, no windows XP support period). That took the better part of an hour to figure out. The rest of the drivers went on smoothly and the laptop is now running XP. . . . will post more about the performance later...

Anyone have any ideas on switching the hard drive's SATA mode back to AHCI now that XP Pro SP2 is on it (when I tried the computer posted an error in BSOD-format and then quickly rebooted itself) without making the computer go haywire?

Thanks