Erm, yeah, you can replace the video card on laptops. I know for a fact that I can upgrade my laptop at least a GF7800 (which wasn't even available for my model from the factory, might I add). I could even replace the CPU if I wanted to.
It definitely depends on the manufacturer, but pretty much all of them make their devices in a modular fashion to save money (that way they can use, say, the same RADEON X300 board in several different notebook models, rather than having to make a different for each GPU).
Well, I'll try to overclock it and see if I can get anywhere with that (mind you I do need to find a way to cool this thing a bit better, they placed the intake fan on the lower part of the bottom, which means it's completely covered when this thing is sitting flat on something.)
I kind of doubt overclocking is going to make it work smoothly unless your components have a ton of OC potential.
Also, bear in mind that with HD stuff like this, the bottleneck could be just about anything, your RAM, your video card, your CPU, your disk controller, or your bus.
I would have just gotten the Xvid encodes, but the guy who encoded them obviously knew nothing about how to optimize the encode for anime, so even for that size, they look like crap (not to mention the color loss is very noticeable.) I've seen some nice Xvid encodes, but these are not nice at all.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I swear some people just open up VirtualDub and drag the slider as far to the left as it goes.