Laptop advice

[Humate]

I got an ibm thinkpad x41 about 5 months ago, i love its portability as i have to take it to and from uni everyday... HOWEVER... it is too slow and i need something faster to run a piece of software i need for uni that needs 2GB ram and is quite CPU intensive. So this leads me to two questions...

How much is my thinkpad x41 worth, and what can i buy that is still portable but has a lot of power. Some things i am after:

1. budget: about £1,000-£1,500 (less would be better).
2. slim and light (portability with power is what im after)
3. 12" screen or smaller
4. full sized keyboard (which i love about the x41)
5. good screen (not shiney) as the software i need for uni is for looking at my microscope images and analysing them, so colour reproduction is really important.
6. Trackpoint (I dont like touchpad)

Any suggestions?

Or maybe i could take my x41 apart and change some hadware for cheaper? it only has 512mb ram atm and the hard drive is only 4 thousand and something rpm (i forget).

hrmmm decisions decisions.

 

[semi-pro waster]

If you want Trackpoint then I think IBM is your only choice, pretty much every other manufacturer that I know of uses a touchpad.

You could certainly look into upgrading the Ram although I don't know how much the x41 can use, they may have a 1gb limit. Changing the hard drive from a 4200rpm to either a 5400rpm or 7200rpm model is also a worthwhile change and quite cost effective as well.

 

[Humate]

The max on RAM is 2GB so that is doable. I am sure the hard drive is a massive bottleneck... im not too sure how fast a pentium M 1.5Ghz should be tho... maybe what im experiencing now is as quick as it can go.