Buying a New Laptop...Advice
 

Hello.

I am planning to bay a Laptop soon and I have kind of decided on a decent spec which should suit my needs just fine. I am not a complete expert on computers so i would appreciate advice regarding this specification.

My requirements for this Laptop are that it needs to be able to play high powered current games, and hopefully last a while for this criteria.

The spec is as follows:-

SONY - INTEL PENTIUM M 750 PROCESSOR 1.86GHz LAPTOP

# Intel Pentium M 750 Processor 1.86GHz
# 533 MHz FSB
# 2 MB Cache
# 1024 MB RAM
# 100 GB Hard Drive
# Double Layer DVD ReWriter MultiDrive
# 17" Widescreen X-Black LCD Display
# Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
# 256 MB ATi Mobility Radeon X600 graphics


To me this seems like a really nice Laptop (High Powered), I will be using it for many things such as many work projects.

However the real testing factor seems to be, can it last as a gaming laptop. From looking at the spec I would have thought that it would, but it doesen't hurt to check now does it.


Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Vivace.

The videocard is pretty bad compared to the other things inside. I saw a laptop with a X1300 not too long ago, I believe that's much better.

No, the x1300 is not better.

But that doesn't mean that the x600 is GOOD, either.

Get something from this generation, like the nVidia 7900 series, or the x1600, for example.

Thanks for your tips. Can anyone here reccomend a suitable Laptop Model which satisfies the above criteria (Decent Nvidia Card, other good specs. etc).

I'm gonna have a look round myself as well.

thanks

Vivace

Again, with my opinion, http://www.abs.com has some good deals for notebooks, especially decent gaming ones. If you had a budget I could help more, but I would stay away from Sony. Their products are good, but they tend to be a bit overpriced in my opinion.

I'm looking for a non-gaming laptop, and I'm more concerned about memory, HD space, and battery life than anything else. The only gaming I do is on emulators, and you don't need a gaming laptop for that. I use my computer now mostly for general purposes, and I want something like that for when I go to college in August.

I was checking out the Compaq/HP customization service for the VT5000 series, and it seems I could customize everything to my liking, with the exception of the screen size. What do you guys recommend?

And would you recommend the Intel Macs? I've heard you can run Windows XP on them. Has anyone here done this successfully? I've seen the www.onmac.net website where they claim to have three different ways to do it, but can you really run programs flawlessly on them? It seems too good to be true.

I wouldn't really go for a Compaq/HP notebook, but much rather for the bigger names. Dells are generally cheap too (over here, at least) and provide good stuff. I saw a notebook for 700 Euro (so make that $800 or so) with a Intel M CPU (I believe) (1.8Ghz), 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, Ati Radeon x1300 and 15" screen.

Going for an Intel Mac seems a nice idea too, because you'll have two operation systems running if you want. That answered your question - with Bootcamp (made by Apple) you can run Windows on Intel-based Macs.