Got a question about the upcoming products?

Since Merom will be put in these notebooks, will they be redesigning the motherboard that they currently have to optimize it with the Merom chip or even add new features? I love the way the W3J looks right now and don't wish they would do anything to it as far as the looks go. And it hasn't been official that the Merom will work in it and if I'm looking to upgrade to it in a year or two, I don't want to be stuck with a notebook that I won't be able to upgrade to Merom later on if I need to and not have it work 100% correctly.

I have about 2-3 weeks before school starts and if I don't get one within these 2-3 weeks, my next chance of getting a notebook will be somewhere next year around this time because I will have to wait until the Merom is integrated into it.

I've been reading these forums for the past couple of weeks and so far I've gathered that all it takes is a BIOS update to make Merom work, but it just seems too easy to be true to go from 32bit to 64bit. Could it be that easy?

My question is, will they just be adding the Merom chip into current models and sell it as with everything else pretty much the same, or will there be drastic changes in the design of the current models? I know it's all speculations right now, but I'm not a hardware guru and time/money is not on my side.

Note: Price doesn't seem to be a factor if everything will work when Merom comes out as a $200-300 cpu chip upgrade in 1-2 years is very trivial at this point of my college career as I will need a laptop to program on right now.
I figure if I buy it for $1800 with one year warranty, theres no stopping me from upgrading to a Merom when it comes out after the warranty ends or when I have a need for it if all I need is a BIOS update to have everything working and Merom price will go down after a while.

Sorry for the long story but $2000 is a lot of money for me to invest right now and I'm not in the position to upgrade to a new computer every couple of months. I will be stuck with this laptop for a while and want to be future-proof.

 

There are now a few good reviews comparing the current coreduo with core2duo ( anandtech). There is no reason to wait for core2 unless a) you do alot of video encoding (about 15% increase there) b) can wait till Xmas.....my guess at the approx time for the w3 to get the core2.
Also there is really not much point at this stage to upgrade a coreduo to the core2 version... you would be better off upgrading the whole laptop when santa rose gets released next year....thats when the m/b is/will be redesigned....and when you may see a bigger performance gap between the two cpus. At the moment on the current m/b's there is little to no real world difference....so if you love the w3j get it now...dont bother waiting for a 5% benchmark increase in performance.
a

 

Thanks for the response, I just wanted to make sure they will not be drastically redesigning anything and the only upgrade will be the cpu. I don't really care about performance as long as it is future-proof. I just want a laptop that will last me a while without having to worry about getting a new one because of something that will change. If the change from 32 bit to 64 bit is just performance, then I'm not too worried as long as it will still work down the line.

Regarding the Santa Rosa:

Personal Internet on the Large Screen
The next generation of Intel Centrino mobile technology, codenamed Santa Rosa and detailed for the first time in Maloney’s keynote, is designed to give users better overall performance and graphics, improved wireless connectivity and improved security and manageability. Santa Rosa is expected to include a more powerful mobile microprocessor, an improved graphics chipset, codenamed Crestline, an IEEE* 802.11n Wi–Fi adapter, codenamed Kedron, as well as Intel–optimized advanced management and security solutions. The platform will also include Intel’s NAND flash–based platform accelerator, codenamed Robson, which enables much more rapid boot–up time and power savings. Santa Rosa, available in the first half of 2007, will use Intel’s next–generation dual–core mobile microprocessor based on Intel’s Core™ microarchitecture, codenamed Merom, Intel’s new foundation for delivering even greater energy–efficient performance. An initial version of Merom will also be available for the current Intel Centrino Duo platform to align with the 2006 holiday buying cycle and will be socket or pin–compatible with the current version of Intel® Core™ Duo processors.

Seems like I found my answer here
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=1478215