the end of dialup?

i been scoping out laptops and netbooks lately. since i'm mostly just surfing and reading email, i am getting close to making the move toward the latter. what scares me off, however, is the lack of an internal MODEM. while i enjoy wifi when others are paying (office, starbucks, nearby campus), i'm perfectly content with free dialup at home.

this has kept me looking at laptops. so imagine my surprise yesterday when the bestbuyotron informed me that none of the LAPTOPS have internal modems now either!! is this true?! am i already doomed to be hanging a USB model off the back?

can an internal modem be ADDED to a laptop? i mean, as easily as, say, RAM?

or is it really a knowledge-intensive operation reserved for those who normally muck around with the guts? for the record, i've never opened up my laptop AT ALL. getting close to putting in some RAM now, but even that's a first.

 

They can't easily be added if the designs don't allow for it. The laptops are pretty much designed to have the components in them that they come with and nothing more. The best thing you can do is look up the laptops on the manufacturers site to see if they have a model with a modem, otherwise, you're stuck with an external device.

 

ok, thanks. do you have a gut feeling as to what %age of new laptops have them?

i'm a bit surprised that the super-cheap ones are lacking them. i mean, what granny buying a $250 single core with XP is gonna dish out for broadband!

 

Most HP laptops still have modems.