How much should the lowest dell laptop drop in price by April?

I'm looking into buying a laptop sometime after my birthday, with accumulated money from christmas, work, and my birthday.

By this time, I hope to raise around $700. I'm going to be using the laptop for programming, schoolwork, portable media, and emulators, so a relatively modest system is fine. (No video card is preferred for this reason, to make the system cheaper)

However, with the current line of pricing, my bare-minimum requirements surpass my future fund. I want to get a dell laptop. Current applicable wanted specs:

Pentium M Processor 740 (1.73Ghz)
>15inch screen
512MB RAM
DVD/CD reader (home computer is writer, no need for writing with the laptop)
40GB hard drive is fine. (Encarta+MSDN might take up some space, but I'll manage)
Integrated sound (nothing special required, I'm not an audiophile)
GOOD wireless card (dell's recommend, I would assume. I want range.)

9-cell battery
Actually, on this issue, how long would a 9-cell vs. a 6-cell last on battery? I do want to be able to take this on 6 hour road trips, as well.

As of right now, this total comes to $828 on the Inspiron B130
However, I do not think I will be able to afford that in April. Do you think that this price will drop due to new technology, and will some of the specs listed become the minimum offered on laptops in the next few months?

I'm doing my research now, before the money's burning holes into my pocket, screaming LAPTOP, LAPTOP, so any help would be appreciated.

 

What sort of emulation are we talking about? If it involves an 3D graphics, you might run into trouble. Even my 64 MB dedicated GPU has trouble with emulating on the lvel of the Nintendo 64. In addition, if your programming involves any 3D graphics, it might be to your advantage to at least get something with Radeon Xpress. You are searching for a good baragin, and you don't need to go out of your way to avoid graphics, if there is indeed a $700 laptop with it. (which there was on Black Friday)

Prices will continue to drop, but not at the same pace as they've been dropping in the past 2-3 years. Like desktops, there is a bottom limit when the market gets saturated, and we're slowly approaching it.

 

Nintendo 64 Emulation isn't perfect on ANY normal system. Example: Try to get Majora's Mask to run perfectly without a voodoo card. It's impossible. PSX, on the other hand, runs fine at OGL2, but I wouldn't be running psx games on my laptop.

Ha, Snes and GBA emus will run fine on 1GHz computers and better, so that's not a problem. I'm keeping 3D programming until college. Right now, I focus on application development and 2D games.

Market saturation may be a problem. Shouldn't the current line of 32-bit processors drop in price when 64 bit processors become more widespread in the laptop field? I highly doubt that'll happen by april, though.

Is a $100 drop in price on the system listed feasible?

 

Bump for the $100 price drop feasibility.

 

I think you should consider buying used, maybe dell outlet.