looking to buy powerbook. some basic questions

I looking to switch to apple and buy a 15" powerbook. Theres a couple of details I cant decide on.
Ive been looking at buying a new powerbook, which would cost me ~$2500 to get it upgraded to 128mb of video ram and the faster 5400 rpm hd, along with a single 512 stick of ram.
I'm trying to decide if its worth spending the extra money for these upgrades, or if i should just buy a refurbished powerbook, with the standard specs, and none of the small upgrades mentioned above. this route would cost me ~$2100.
I would hope to play some games, so I'm wondering if i should go for the extra video memory, and if I would appreciate the extra speed performance of the faster hd.
Thanks for any input. I'm having a hard time getting myself to spend this much money on a computer, but I really would like to have a powerbook.

yosef said:

I looking to switch to apple and buy a 15" powerbook. Theres a couple of details I cant decide on.
Ive been looking at buying a new powerbook, which would cost me ~$2500 to get it upgraded to 128mb of video ram and the faster 5400 rpm hd, along with a single 512 stick of ram.
I'm trying to decide if its worth spending the extra money for these upgrades, or if i should just buy a refurbished powerbook, with the standard specs, and none of the small upgrades mentioned above. this route would cost me ~$2100.
I would hope to play some games, so I'm wondering if i should go for the extra video memory, and if I would appreciate the extra speed performance of the faster hd.
Thanks for any input. I'm having a hard time getting myself to spend this much money on a computer, but I really would like to have a powerbook.

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Well, for games the ATI card should work pretty well. I have a 12" PowerBook with the Nvidia GeForce FX GO 5200 card with 64MB of VRAM, and 512MB RAM, and I can run pretty much any game at the highest graphics settings without a problem. I guess if you want your PowerBook to last longer you should upgrade the VRAM so that your PB can run games 2-3 years ago, but with 64 MB VRAM your PB should have no trouble with today's games. If you buy an old PowerBook and upgrade the RAM heavily, it should be able to maybe handle most games nowadays on medium graphics settings, but it wouldn't be able to run any games 2 years from now. I guess it all depends on whether you want a PowerBook that will run games fast for years. If you think you'll grow out of gaming, a 64MB Graphics Card is fine, if you're not a heavy gamer and just play the occaisonnal BF1942 round, and if you're serious about gaming and probably will be for a number of years, go for the 128MB Graphics Card.

As for the hard drive, I couldn't really tell you, since my PowerBook only has a 4200RPM drive. But I guess it would increase load times, etc. substantially. You may also want to look into 7200RPM laptop drives, they're not cheap but they come in up to 60GB of space. And it's almost double what you'd get with a 4200RPM drive.

Anyways, good luck with buying!