[jr2]

or, ground yourself on something else metal in your house that's not touching your components at all.  the charges involved are not large enough to make this matter, but it's worth noting that the chassis isn't grounded itself.

Yeah but the charge doesn't matter as long as it's equal.. think: if your computer case has a charge (let's say, it's touching something that has a charge on the desk - unlikely, but w/e) and then you touch it, the charge from the computer will flow to you, damaging the component unless you touch it first.  You can ground yourself, and that should get rid of the problem, but on your walk back to the computer, you can easily build a damaging charge back up.

Basically: you can have 50,000 V in you, and as long as the computer case is equally charged, no harm done, as  no current will flow, meaning no equipment damage.  However, now you have to think: that 50,000 V can definitely damage your equipment when you pick it up, or when it gets installed into your computer... so yeah, grounding everything out would be the best bet at the start.

Actually, it's really good if the PSU has a power on/off switch, and you shut that off, and leave it plugged in, as then the case is grounded... only problem is then you're trusting that the switch really did kill all of the power. (Which it should have.)

EDIT:

i always grounded by plugging the power supply into the wall. if youve ever taken apart a power supply (i needed the power mosfets and regulators), you know that the ground pin mounts to the chassis, so once mounted in the case the case is also grounded. so staying in contact with the case is what i do.

ninja'd, didn't read all of your post...

[Nuke]

ive taken countless power supplies apart. its not a task you should take likely, let it sit unpowered for a few days, and discharge caps and inductors properly. its not something most people should do, but if you need inductors, voltage regulators and capacitors, a fan or 2 its loaded with good salvage parts. but then you realize they are all mostly the same kinda stuff. the switch is always the first thing after the plug, might be a fuse of sorts in there, and possibly some sensing components, before the transformer and rectifier. most of the circuitry is dc from there, linear or switch mode regulators, filters, etc.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

my 2003 rig still functions on mostly original hardware, i did do a ram upgrade a year after i built it and i did have to replace the power supply, and as a result the cd drive, and the hard drive has been swapped a couple times, last time being when i installed win 7 on it. other than that its the same old rig and still functional. mom uses it to watch porn. not bad for an $800 rig. then there was that 3k rig i bought, its been through 3 mobos, 2 video cards, 2 sets of ram 2 power supplies. i swear every part of it has been replaced at lest once. i hate that rig. its why my last build was another $800 box, which if things go well will last as long as the one i built 9 years ago. id rather build an $800 rig every 2 years than to build a high performance rig every 5+ years, throwing money at it to keep it alive.

Damn, now I feel more convinced to try and build my own computer once I get the chance.

[Bob-san]

@Bob-san: Yeah, smart phones are nice, and I pretty much love my iPhone. However, it's too small (960x640) and too clumsy to actually do work beyond checking up references. Lots of my friends use iPads, but I'm not sold on them right now.

My Galaxy S II is pretty much the same but it provides diversions and media pretty well. My mom loves her Kindle Fire... prefers it to her Android smartphone. Either way screen res has less to do with it than density and physical size. Touchscreens do suck though.

Btw my desktops have pretty good lives. My hard learned rule is now to never underestimate the power of RAID arrays. If i was rebuilding my first desktop, I would have bought an Abit IP35 instead of the stripped down IP35-E. And I woulda bought a Radeon HD3850-512 instead of 256. Otherwise a Pentium E2140 @ 3.2ghz rocked. I was a fool for "upgrading" to an E6300 Wolfdale @ 3.8ghz and not going for a C2Q instead.

[LHN91]

Same on the desktops lasting a while. My last desktop was a rebuilt P4 1.8 Northwood that was a free giveaway in..... 2005? I think? After moving to a different case, a GPU upgrade and a RAM upgrade it's still in service as a basic HTPC at my aunt's house. My current box is coming up on 3 years old in the fall, and it was a budget build done on about 600 originally, with a few upgrades here and there (Upgraded to 4 GB of G-Skill RAM, picked up a HD4870 for 50 bucks).

Although, on the original topic: I've looked a bit and haven't seen much in the way of laptops that fit the billing. I've seen a couple that would be alright if you added an SSD yourself, for example, but nothing quite on spec.

Also, side note about Optimus/Switchable Graphics. From what I've read, Optimus is the superior solution in terms of battery life. However, the biggest issue with any switchable graphics solution is that they rely on the system OEM to provide driver updates. So inevitably, several companies leave severely outdated drivers as their "current" drivers for their products with switchable solutions.

[jr2]

For the SSD, could you just pop a 128GB SD card (~$170 incl shipping) in the card reader slot and use that?

[LHN91]

For the SSD, could you just pop a 128GB SD card (~$170 incl shipping) in the card reader slot and use that?

You could, I guess. You'd need a very high end SD 3.0 reader to get any decent kind of speed.

[Klaustrophobia]

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to install an OS to that, it would just be storage.

[headdie]

depends on the motherboard iirc, I think it has been done with HDDs using twin USB 2

[Nuke]

For the SSD, could you just pop a 128GB SD card (~$170 incl shipping) in the card reader slot and use that?

no do not do this. ive got a laptop using a cf card as a hard drive and it is slow as ****. sd cards have a serial interface, and hc cards have a 4-bit parallel interface, where cf cards have a fast parallel interface (its for all intents and purposes a pata device, you can connect one to your mobo pata ports with a passive adapter board). the fact that its flash is what really makes it slow. for a ssd to be fast it uses arrays of flash chips where things like cf and sd use a single flash chip.

[Al-Rik]

My current laptop (a VAIO FW) has lasted me three years, and probably has 2-3 more years of functional life. I would keep it if the ATI 3650 HD in it wasn't rapidly becoming an insufficient GPU. What I meant by #7 is 3-4 years of not crapping out and dying (so build quality), not 3-4 years of futureproofing, in case I caused some confusion. I don't even expect desktops to be futureproofed for 4 years without being unusually exorbitant (quad SLI GTX 690s anyone?)
...
But I don't want to use a desktop for mainly two reasons: way too lazy to keep files up to date on multiple platforms, and the portability is good for travel.

If the desktop is build well and properly maintained ( removing the dust in the heatsinks once per year ) the Hardware should last longer than 4 years before crapping out.

But most PC-Systems from the big retailers aren't build well:
Small Cases with bad airflow, no dust filters at the intakes, lots of unneeded stuff like card readers and tv-tuner.

IMHO the best option for you is to use your actual Laptop for working (GPU still sufficient), a Desktop for gaming and a NAS for storing all the data ( movies , pictures, music ) at one place.

Use a good Midi Tower ( mounts for at least 120 mm Fans with dust filter at the intake, and the possibility to route the cables behind the mainboard tray ) and stay away from the newest "High End CPUs and Graphic Cards".
If you don't want to play in 3D or with 3 TFTs a decent middle class CPU and graphic card is enough to get 120 fps with Freespace 2 SCP ( 3.6.14 RC 5 with the newest shaders ) or even Battlefield 3 in 1900 x 1080 with AA.
The main benefit of the middle class GFX Cards: they don't run as hot as the high end cards, so they make less noise.

If you don't want to build the system self, there are more than enough small shops that build systems at the customers request - and they even give more than 2 years guarantee for a small extra fee

[jr2]

For the SSD, could you just pop a 128GB SD card (~$170 incl shipping) in the card reader slot and use that?

no do not do this. ive got a laptop using a cf card as a hard drive and it is slow as ****. sd cards have a serial interface, and hc cards have a 4-bit parallel interface, where cf cards have a fast parallel interface (its for all intents and purposes a pata device, you can connect one to your mobo pata ports with a passive adapter board). the fact that its flash is what really makes it slow. for a ssd to be fast it uses arrays of flash chips where things like cf and sd use a single flash chip.

One of those SD cards was 50MB/s read, 35MB/s write (Class 10); the other was 45/45 (UHS Speed Class 1)... that doesn't seem too slow, as long as your card reader supports it (max real throughput on a 7200 RPM drive is IIRC 50-60MB/s (you can have the fastest interface in the world, but the data only flies under the heads based on rotation speed and data density) -- that's not even counting 4200 RPM laptop drives, which are slower.  However, also IIRC, they are starting to use different technologies to pack more data on the same amount of physical space on the hard disk, (storing the magnetic bits 'vertically' instead of 'horizontally' on the platters) so that should drive actual data rates up.  If you don't believe me, grab HD Tune 2.55 (the last free version) from MajorGeeks.com and do a benchmark.
EDIT: looked it up, the numbers have changed since I last looked:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Data_transfer_rate

As of 2010, a typical 7,200 rpm desktop hard drive has a sustained "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rate up to 1,030 Mbits/sec.[88] A little quick maths shows this to be 128 Mbytes/sec. More quick maths shows that 4200RPM drives will be 75MB/s, and 5400RPM will be 96MB/s -jr2 This rate depends on the track location, so it will be higher for data on the outer tracks (where there are more data sectors) and lower toward the inner tracks (where there are fewer data sectors); and is generally somewhat higher for 10,000 rpm drives. A current widely used standard for the "buffer-to-computer" interface is 3.0 Gbit/s SATA, which can send about 300 megabyte/s (10-bit encoding) from the buffer to the computer, and thus is still comfortably ahead of today's disk-to-buffer transfer rates. Data transfer rate (read/write) can be measured by writing a large file to disk using special file generator tools, then reading back the file. Transfer rate can be influenced by file system fragmentation and the layout of the files.[83]

HDD data transfer rate depends upon the rotational speed of the platters and the data recording density. Because heat and vibration limit rotational speed, advancing density becomes the main method to improve sequential transfer rates.[89] While areal density advances by increasing both the number of tracks across the disk and the number of sectors per track, only the latter will increase the data transfer rate for a given rpm. Since data transfer rate performance only tracks one of the two components of areal density, its performance improves at a lower rate.

The real problem here is going to be if they put a POS card reader in your laptop.

[Nuke]

well i was going right through the pata port with a passive adapter. it was a cf card rated at 300x (which is the same rating as cd roms use, where 1x = 150k bytes / sec, so ~45 megabit).  i could also go through a pc card adapter, though that would probibly cost you performance and you couldnt boot from it, thought of doing a software raid 0 with a pair of 16 gb cards.  granted the laptops an archaic piece of **** that has trouble running xp. i looked at an sd adapter but it seemed slower than the cf card. seems there are higher speed sd cards out there though. i just cobbled this together wits spare parts that i had lying around.

[jr2]

Yeah, beware -- cheap SD cards are slow as molasses in January north of the US-Canadian border.    Always look at the speed rating unless it really doesn't matter to you.  Low speed cards are why cameras have to sit for two minutes after taking an HQ picture - it's saving the image from internal memory to the cheap crappy $10 SD card was bought for that nice $800 camera. 

[Bob-san]

Yeah, beware -- cheap SD cards are slow as molasses in January north of the US-Canadian border.    Always look at the speed rating unless it really doesn't matter to you.  Low speed cards are why cameras have to sit for two minutes after taking an HQ picture - it's saving the image from internal memory to the cheap crappy $10 SD card was bought for that nice $800 camera. 

Class 2 means 2 MB/s, Class 4 means 4 MB/s, Class 6 means 6 MB/s, Class 10 means 10 MB/s. There's now also UHS-I & UHS-II--which define truly high-speed SD cards--starting at about 100 MB/s and extending up to 312 MB/s. These two may be supported by the card but most manufacturers use a USB 2.0 card reader which limits theoretical bandwidth to 480 MBit/s (60 MByte/s--including significant data overhead). USB 3.0 readers may be different, assuming the manufacturer actually dedicates a USB 3.0 interface to the card reader section.

[MP-Ryan]

Late to this party, but I'm another fan of the cheap laptop + gaming desktop solution.  If you build your own desktop (Tom's Hardware Mid-range system builder guide is always a good starting point) and just get a cheap laptop that will last 2-3 years without crapping out, you can probably bring your total expenditure in under $2000.  Doesn't allow for much mobile gaming, but it's a hell of a lot more economical in the long run than a high-performance laptop as your primary system.

[jr2]

Yeah, beware -- cheap SD cards are slow as molasses in January north of the US-Canadian border.    Always look at the speed rating unless it really doesn't matter to you.  Low speed cards are why cameras have to sit for two minutes after taking an HQ picture - it's saving the image from internal memory to the cheap crappy $10 SD card was bought for that nice $800 camera. 

Class 2 means 2 MB/s, Class 4 means 4 MB/s, Class 6 means 6 MB/s, Class 10 means 10 MB/s. There's now also UHS-I & UHS-II--which define truly high-speed SD cards--starting at about 100 MB/s and extending up to 312 MB/s. These two may be supported by the card but most manufacturers use a USB 2.0 card reader which limits theoretical bandwidth to 480 MBit/s (60 MByte/s--including significant data overhead). USB 3.0 readers may be different, assuming the manufacturer actually dedicates a USB 3.0 interface to the card reader section.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#Speed_Class_Rating