Questions from a penny pincher.

Hi everybody, I've been lurking here for about a week, and I've never seen anyone quite as willing to help as you guys, so I decided to register. I've read the threads as far back as I could, but I still have a couple of questions.

First off, I'm still about two months away from my lappy purchase, but I'm pretty sure I'm going with the 8886. I carry a backpack with about 30 pounds of books everyday, so I don't think the weight will bother me, and it just has everything I'm looking for. But, I was wondering what kind of configuration options (or even new Sager models) we will have to choose from in the near future. Will hyperthreading be available then (and what will the price premium be), will there be a new model of ATI or Nvidia GPU, 16 inch UXGA, etc.?

Also, this purchase would be an extremely significant portion of my annual income, so I am wondering about some of the options for lowering the price. I wouldn't need a second hard drive right away, so is there any way to purchase just the bracket and install a second drive myself later on? For that matter, I have a 10 GB drive just gathering dust at the moment, is it possible to buy the Sager without any hard drives at all?

Can the computer be purchased without any RAM (I have a stick of PC2100 from a friend who fried his laptop while simultaneously voiding the warranty)? He's out two grand, but I'm up 256MB. I also don't need an SD stick for the MP3 player, can I get it without?

I don't want anyone to think I'm cheap (when you're practically broke you have no choice), or that I'm trying to deprive Adam of his profit margin, which by all indications he deserves, but I just want to be able to afford a Sager as soon as possible.

And, I don't know how many of you agree, but the option of not having the price of Windows XP tacked onto that of the laptop is a big selling point for me. I already have 3 academic copies of XP Pro from when Microsoft was pimping .Net at my school (UW).

You all (Beebster in particular) have answered every other question I had before I stumbled into this place. Thanks a lot.

Wow, you responded really fast. I absolutely understand that you are limited in what you can give as far as configuration, especially for a laptop. Yes, the ram I have is PC2100 in the SODIMM form factor. My main concern was just that I hate already having a perfectly usable part and not being able to use it. The idea of using my 10gig laptop drive as the primary is probably not so great though, considering the detriment to performance.

But, I would like to purchase the bracket for a secondary hard drive and put my 10gig in it for backing up data. Is it possible to just buy the bracket, or am I missing something and the bracket already comes with the 8886 and that's why no one else has ever mentioned it.

At present, I am budgeting about $2200 for my Sager, and I should be able to swing it in about two months. Thank you Adam for responding so quickly and for whatever flexibility you are able to give me on the RAM configuration. I was wondering if I will be able to get the 8886-V with no RAM at that price point as the cash price?

Thanks for replying, Beeb. I must have been writing my reply to Adam when you responded. Yeah, the 10gig would be a bottleneck, so I've chucked that idea. Thanks again for all the help, I generally just lurk on all the forums that I follow, but you and everyone else here made it an easy decision to jump in. Good luck with your studies.

Thanks. Price seems very reasonable.

I'm actually considering the RAM issue. I may just bite the bullet and get 512 in the system, and then add the RAM that I have to that. I doubt there would be much difference between having 768MB and the V's base configuration of 1024MB.

When I was first looking at laptops, I was mainly considering the Dell, so I'm used to getting ripped off by their configurator (well, pretending to get ripped off). PCTorque's configurator is not nearly as mean to me.