I've been reading about these complaints regarding HDMI cables for years now and while I agree the design is pretty piss poor I still wonder how many people have actually had connectors fail and that sort of thing?
If I recall AutoCAD only takes advantage of the pro-versions of the GPUs. Coolermaster has some decent cases for about $50 and I would also recommend newegg over mwave. I've used mwave in the past and their shipping prices tended be very high.
As much as I usually suggest just buying all the parts and putting it together yourself if it's not going to be used for much outside of web browsing, e-mail and office you ought to take a look at some of the cheap dell desktops.
yeah always a good idea to take out the hard drive before sending a laptop in. i hope they didn't end up charging $700 or whatever you mentioned earlier in the thread, that'd be completely absurd for replacing a $100 part.