Customize Toshibas in Canada? Also: M50-MX2

Hi all, I'm going to be buying a laptop soon (possibly later tonight). I'm reasonably set on getting a Toshiba, both because of good experience with them in the past, and because my GF has a friend who claims she can get us an employee discount; that brings me to the urgency: she's having dinner with my GF later tonight, so we may be buying the laptop right after dinner.

My first question concerns customizing Toshibas: I've seen people claim that you can customize an M50 to have a Radeon X600SE video card, but I've only seen this ability on the US website (toshibadirect.com). The Toshiba Canada site only seems to have preconfigured models, and the only ones I've seen with discrete video are the very expensive ones, or the very large 17" ones (usually the two categories are overlapping). Am I missing something?

Since we plan on gaming a little on it (mostly World of Warcraft and Civ4), we'd ideally like a discrete card, although it doesn't have to be a great one (~X300 quality).

Right now, we're leaning towards the M50-MX2, since it's one of the cheapest laptops we've seen ($1000 CDN, currently on sale at Futureshop for $900 CDN), yet it's reasonably light, just the right size (14" screen), and even has a Radeon 200M graphics package (not ideal, but it seems to be a step up from the Intel GMA900 that most of the other models have).

Which brings me to my second question: Does anyone have any opinions on this model? I'm most concerned about battery life. We routinely take the train to visit our families, which is a 2-2.5 hour trip in the best of times, so we'd like one that we could scrape 3 hours out of... but the Toshiba website only gives it a 2 hour rating (I've heard that these are inaccurate, sometimes too low, so there's hope). I also can't find any spare batteries for it. The batteries for the other M50 models run at a fairly steep $200 each, yet they all say that they're not compatable with the MX2. The other models seem to all have 6-cell batteries rated for 3.5 hours, but the MX2 only has a 4-cell. If I could find a way to customize it, an upgraded battery would probably be preferable to carrying a spare.

 

Well, what's your full budget? I'm not too familiar with the Canada Toshiba site (I'm in the US), but I would think that Toshiba would give you the option to customize - it's odd that they don't. I suggest trying to look around FS more to see if there aren't any new deals out there. In addition, I don't know if your GF's friend can get you a discount unless you buy it directly through Toshiba. The 6-Cell battery should be an optional/replacement part that's available through Toshiba's replacement part depot. The X200M isn't going to rip through games, and probably won't be able to play some newer ones, so don't be too dissapointed. You should get about 2.5 hours of battery life - maybe 1.5-2 with the 4-cell.