I am gonna get a laptop so i can play worms armageddon and compressed video files when im away from home my questions are: 1.) what are the minimum specs for playing back mpeg1 2 and 3 as well as divx and wmv clips? especially taking into consideration this is a laptop i know worms will play smoothly enough on anything greater than PII 200mhz and very little ram I will definetely not be trying to play dvds since laptops with dvdrom drives are too expensive on ebay and usually the laptops in my pricerange only have 3-6gig hdds leaving out the possibility of putting dvd movies .iso images on hdd 2.)ive noticed that perfectly fine laptops sinmply missing things like a hdd go for up to $60 cheaper than complete laptops on ebay, and its just my luck that i have a 6gig laptop hdd lying around from the laptop i fried, what are my chances that my hdd will work in any laptop? are these things truly universal like desktop hdds are? and im also conscerned about the hdd caddy since the laptops often do not include the hdd caddy, could i jimmy-rig some kind of device to act like a caddy? 3.) whats the battery life like on these older 3-5 year old laptops, anyone have any experience with them? 4.) is there a means of powering a laptop through a car cirgarette lighter? im pretty sure there is. and if so, do some laptops have specific ac adapters made only for them that can be used in cigarette lighters? or are universal cigarette lighter adapters available? is my best bet to just pick up a power inveter and plug the laptops regular ac adapter into it? thanks for your time spent reading all my questions common sense isn't very common

1. I don't know the exact specs but I have an old Dell Inspiron 7500 running at 500mhz and it play videos just fine without stuttering or skipping. 2. It probably will fit. There are different hight specifications for older drives though. 3. It will be impossible to say what the battery life of an older laptop battery will be. Many factors will determine the life cycle such as how many times has it been charged, if it was kept in storage for a while was the charge maintained, was it subjected to high temperatures like being left in a car on a hot summer day, etc. 4. Yes you can buy power adaptors for laptops that plug into a car cirgarette lighter. Here is a URL to a website that I get all my laptop parts from. They have batteries, hard drives, laptop car power adaptors and other such goodies. http://www.priorityelectronics.com/

thanks Kurt what i meant about the battery life, is for exampe i know that my sister's 2 year old dell and other laptops about its age get 2 and a half hours on a battery do older laptops have this kind of battery life? or is it more like 1-1and a half hours just in general, meaning like what would have been expected battery life when new? common sense isn't very common