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| | Test drive: Laptops - Greenwich Time |
 | | They're dropping the prices on mid-level machines that might have cost two to three times the price as recent as three years ago, offering the likes of an 800-megahertz processor, 128 megabytes of RAM, and a 10- to 20-gigabyte hard drive for $1,300 to $2,000. |
 | | Another trend to notice: the increase in the number of laptops with no extra "spindles" or drives; instead, to save weight, the separate drive mechanisms for reading floppies or CDs or DVDs are either plugged into a port or left at home on a docking tray. |
 | | Still, it is weight-not processing power, battery life or the ability to play a DVD of "The English Patient"-that is the single largest factor driving the market for laptops and notebooks, said Mark Margevicius, a market analyst with Gartner Dataquest, a technology industry research firm. |
| www.greenwichtime.com /sns-testdrive061201,0,6399227.story (931 words) |
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