I think I paid roughly $650 for this model (maybe $550), but I just did a lot of work including a mobo swap on a friend's DV2000 and I found the mobo for just under $40 @ ztronics which is substantially less in price. I accept that a mobo with a decent GPU may be more than $40, but I expect it would be a lot less than a whole new PC and in my life, times are always tough. I will continue my never ending search for this answer. Thanks again for taking the time to entertain my question.
It's easy enough to change, it's just a matter of going to your laptop manufacturers website and checking what gpu's are used in the range that your case is, say Toshiba satellite Pro's a100/a110 then they had a long run of production so you can easily get gpu's from Intel onboard to external ati's/Nvide's, thing is though there are two types for each as you can get a decent inbuilt graphics that you just swap boards others are plugged in to the board and they are quite expensive and are sold separately so you would need to buy a mb and gpu, ebays good for stuff like this as you can buy laptops that have broken/faulty screens real cheap and just use the mb/gpu.