Systemax's Pursuit: sub-$1,000 Merom action
One of the best things about the new Core 2 Duo fad is that the majority of manufacturers who previously sold laptops with Core Duo chips have upgraded their models with little or no increase in price. The latest company to upgrade without upping prices is Systemax, which is about to endow its low-cost Pursuit laptops with Core 2 Duo processors and a new slim design. The new configuration features the same 15.4-inch widescreen LCD, 1GB of RAM, 80GB Hard Drive, 1.3 megapixel webcam, and DVD burner as its predecessor, but adds a 1.66GHz Merom processor to give an estimated 20% performance increase over the 1.6GHz Core Duo model. Retaining the price of the old model, the newly-speced Pursuit will be priced at $999.99, although we're not too optimistic that the old model's $200 mail-in rebate will stick around.
