I am in need of your laptop buying skills!
 

I figured it would of been better to post in another thread alike mine that's already in existance. But most posters to post after mine tend to stray from my needs and end up giving advice to the thread owner. So, here's one exclusively about my needs.

Currently I've somehow managed to find my back into college and in need of a 4-year "everlasting machine"/notebook.

Budget: $3,000 from student loan.

Now, I don't know enough about computers to judge them, but I know fairly enough to work them and mess around with them. I'm looking for places where I can browse new laptops with 3.0+ ghz processor, 256MB vid card, 1-2GB memory, 40+gb HD, and 15-17" normal/widescreen display.

Basically, it's got to be as good as whatever $3,000 can buy, from a recognizable vendor, and going to last me for college + Gaming-crave.

I've already tried various vendor's websites, like Dell, HP, Gateway, and also have tried Ebay. Ebay seems somewhat promising as they've got that nifty search nav. And I've found a possibly good find on a HP machine. But I could definately use some more help.

www.newegg.com is good for laptops, I'd say, although I stand by the opinion that Dell makes some pretty good laptops if you don't mind bloatware.

I'll tell ya, any laptop with those specs will have ZERO battery life, so this better be a desktop replacement.

EDIT: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834220066 That's a pretty hot laptop right there. Nice looking too.

Just get a 800 dollar one from best buy (after rebate). Their on sale everyweek

Ehh, I've changed my mind, desktop replacement it is. I'll learn to cope with the short battery life. Plus, there are outlet jacks everywhere at school. Lay it on me hard with nifty finds. Thanks!

http://www.pctorque.com/
I think the 9000's may be what you are looking for.

I would suggest against a desktop replacement. Big, hot running noisy things, not to mention the crappy battery life. You might be better off getting a lower spec laptop and building yourself a nice gaming rig to play your games and they are much more easilly (and cheaply) upgraded

If your gonna be lugging the thing too and from lectures all the time you really will appreciate the battery life and weight & size issues

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Pentium-M chip yet. It's faster than a 3ghz Pentium 4, yet isn't a power whore. Hell, they just came out with the dual core version of the P-M.

As for a vendor of laptops, maybe consider a manufacturer that will let you create a customized laptop with the specs you need. It may end up being cheaper. A tech friend at work did this very thing with Dell, and he got a dual core processor, 1gb of RAM, and a X1400 256mb vid card for $1500 with 3 year ext. warranty. Damn good in my book.

About the Pentium M chips, vendors like Dell display that they run at 2-2.26ghz. And they do not have any customizable selections that allow you to choose dual core.

And thanks for the input as well everyone. I still don't know if I can get anything worthwhile for 3,000 dollars, but I'm still looking.

Edit: There's something else I'd like to know more about regarding Video cards/graphics. When someone says it has 256MB, does that mean 256 dedicated? or 128 dedicated and 128 shared? What's the difference between dedicated and shared?

A Pentium M at 2.26GHz will at least equal a 3GHz Pentium 4 in performance. Plus, Pentium 4 laptops are huge, have no battery life, and run really hot. I've never really trusted desktop replacement laptops, since high temperatures usually equal bad stability and reliability.

Maybe something like a Dell XPS would work for you? They have Pentium M processors combined with GeForce 7800 graphics chips, which are about the fastest ones you can buy now.

Get a MacBook Pro. For $2,300 (edu discount) you get a 2.0GHz dual-core Pentium M, 256MB Radeon X1600, a gig of RAM (expandable to 2), DVD±R/RW SuperDrive, beautiful 1440 x 900 15" widescreen, built-in iSight, and it's still delightfully portable.

I'm using an HP Desktop Replacement (Pavilion zv6000). Aside from the average computor problems, this thing is pretty great. I'm speakin in favor of Desktop Replacements, this one doesnt make that much noise (I can hear the fan if I listen closely, the only thing that's noisy is the disk drive when it's reading DVDs.

Then again, i use mine like a normal PC, it stays plugged in for the most part, so the battery issue isn't a problem for me. If you want to run around and not worry about where to find an outlet, then this kind of laptop isn't for you, and if you plan on carrying it around at school and such note that they are very heavy for their size.

Whhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!

If I had $2000, I could make an amazing jack-of-all-trades machine. You'll want a machine via a site like www.newegg.com.

With 3k, you can get the whole set up with software and money for random extra hard drives.

If I were you, I'd get myself a nice, small laptop with a good battery life - spend ~$1000 and then spend $2000 on a gaming desktop. I can build a computer with THE BEST parts on the market for about $2300 CDN, so I'm assuming that you can build the same thing for about $1800 US using Newegg.

Should we even consider the weight of the laptop? Or do you not mind carrying 12 lbs of useless?

I went the same route. P4 with 2.5Ghz, but shitty battery life and hellacious heat.

No more.

My next laptop will be a Pentium M, possibly a dual-core. Asus is looking pretty good these days.

Take everyone's advice: build a separate gaming PC and buy a less power laptop for studying. As for the laptop, I've always been attracted to very small and compact laptops such as Toshiba Portege series, but I'm not sure about maintainance issues as they are very small.

When they quote the memory for a graphics card, they mean dedicated memory. Cards in laptops that still use the AGP bus will utilise some system memory alongside its own dedicated memory when that runs low. This "aperture size" can be set by the user in the BIOS. If you wish to read more on it click here. I do not know how PCI-Express cards work in terms of memory sharing.

Do not be fooled by the size of the memory, which companies often use to fool unsuspecting consumers into thinking that more memory is better. The memory do not determine how powerful the graphics card is, but rather the clock speeds of the GPU, memory, and the number of graphics pipelines the card has.

I'll third that. I made the horrendous mistake of getting a beastishly huge desktop replacement with a P4 chip (Dell 9100). Never again, getting an Apple if I can, and being able to install Windows makes it everything I'd ever want in a computer.

Dell just upgraded their XPS line and threw in the new Intel Core Duo T2000 series processors and NVidia GeForce 7900 Go GPUs. Problem: It makes for a very expensive laptop. On paper, at least, the 7900GS is less powerful than the 7800GTX, but Dell won't allow you to get a 7800 with their XPS machines, forcing you to get the 7900GS or pay an extra $400 for a 7900GTX. I was just about ready to get a Pentium M with a 7800GTX and 2 gig RAM for $2,400. Now the cheapest XPS they offer is $2,600 and that's with the 7900GS that I'm not so confident in. So I am also looking for a powerful laptop, around $2,500 budget. Yes, I will be in college, but battery life doesn't matter to me because I do notes the old-fashioned way - pencil and paper. The laptop will be used for multimedia and probably some coding and 3D editing. I know your everyday gaming laptop isn't optimized for 3D editing but I won't be doing the kind of stuff that really should be done on a workstation.

I'd say lay off on the bigass gaming notebook as well. You'd be better off splitting that $3,000 budget into a good ~$1,000 light notebook and a ~$2,000 gaming desktop. and for $2,000, you can get a damn good desktop.

But, if you've already decided on a kickass gaming notebook for $3,000, check out http://www.abs.com if you haven't yet. It's great stuff.

EDIT: Here's your custom notebook from ABS....

G5 Vanguard Notebook

Processor: Pentium M 770 (2.13 GHz) 533MHz, 2MB L2 Cache
GPU: GeForce Go 7800GTX
RAM: 1x1GB Kingston RAM DDR2 533
HDD: Hitachi 100GB 5400RPM
Optical Drive: Dual DVD Burner
Wireless: Intel 802.11 a/b/g M-PCI PRO
Others: Add whatever you want after this.....

That above had a pricetag of $2,539.99