Poll: If you had one upgrade...

Suppose that for some reason you could no longer have your current laptop (aliens abduct it or whatever suits your fancy) and you have to buy a new one. Unfortunately funds are limited, so you have to buy a rather low cost model. Here's what you get:

15.4-inch 1280x800 display (glossy or matte, your choice)
Intel Core 2 Duo T5270 processor (1.4 GHz)
1 GB DDR2 RAM, 533 MHz
40 GB, 5400 RPM Hard Disk Drive
CD/RW, DVD Read Optical Drive
Intel GMA X3100 Graphics, empty MXM-II slot
Windows Vista Home Premium
Wireless A/B/G
6-Cell, 53 WHr Battery

So it might be a bit less than what you'd ideally have. And you neither have the money to upgrade it nor are likely to anytime soon. Fortunately, a magic genie comes along and offers to make one upgrade to you, free of cost. Here are you choices:

Battery
Switch to a free, 12-cell, 110 WHr battery. Twice the life away from electricity.

Graphics Card
Fortunately this laptop came with a good heatsink. No more playing your favorite game on the GMA X3100, you can have an nVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTX and play it the way it's meant to be played.

Hard Drive
Small and slow is what you have. Upgrade to a 200 GB, 7200 RPM hard drive for maximum speed and much higher capacity.

Memory
Take it up to 4 GB at 667 MHz and run as much as you like at one time.

Operating System
Not a big fan of Vista? No problem, have a free copy of Windows XP. Or whichever other non-free operating system you'd like.

Optical Drive
Enjoy a nice Blu-Ray R/W drive for the latest high-def movies, or a backup of more than half your hard drive at once. The genie includes a complementary external HD-DVD R/W in case you were on the losing side of the format war.

Processor
Tired of waiting for the 1.4 GHz processor to finish up? Have a shiny new Core 2 Duo T9500 (2.6 GHz) replace it today.

Screen Resolution
Have to have more pixels? Enjoy a nice WUXGA 1920x1200 display.

Tablet Screen
Wish you could have a tablet PC? Now you can, with the genie's transformation of your screen into a 15.4-inch tablet screen. It's a bit bigger than most, true, but hey, it's still a tablet screen.

Wireless Card
If it's all about maximum wireless range, a Wireless N card is in the works for you.

 

I would sell the laptop to the magic genie and also get the real upgrade cost of 8800M GTX from him/her. Then, with all that money, I would buy a decent laptop with balanced components.

 

T9500 for sure!

I'd want all the processing power i could get. Would even be able to play processor intensive games.

 

processor... 1.4 is WAY to slow... at times I push my core 2 Quad up to 85% usage... just imagine what I would do to a 1.4

 

5¼-inch floppy disk drive jks haha

8800GTX! for a gamer of course as gpu's are usually the bottlenecks of the system

 

tablet screen for me, since i already have some good specs, at least for my purposes.

much nicer though would be some kind of 3 dimensional interface, that reads my movements as input. some kind of laser scanning my movements. so while i´m working i could do some kind of workout to stay in good shape.

 

Voting without reading the hypothetical it was a no brainer, the Operating System. Of course after reading the scenario, it would be the GPU/Graphics sub system.

 

Graphics: 8800M GTX ... hardest to upgrade later on (probably)

 

Not a big pc gamer so processor all the way. And seeing as I'm so hypothetically broke it would be cheaper to upgrade my RAM in the future on my meager hypothetical salary

 

Incredibly I'd take the 8800M GTX. This is of course presuming I can then spend a bit of my own money upgrading the ram myself up to 2GB.

The only reason I have upgraded from my L100 is it's weak x200m IGP.

 

I'd take the 8800m since that's pretty much impossible to upgrade and upgrade the rest myself (since most of it is upgradeable )

 

Knew I forgot something...

The hypothetical graphics is upgradeable; that's why it has the empty MXM-II slot. The genie does do a bit of magic with the 15.4-inch tablet screen, and free stuff (Santa Claus contacts?), but, with MXM graphics, laptop graphics are upgradeable. It's just that the vast majority do not have MXM.