Need Advice for buying a gaming laptop...

[Soapmonkey]

Okay, first lets talk about what I have for a desktop.

AMD64 FX-53
2 gig Ram
BFG 6800 Ultra
2 Raptor HDs
Plextor, etc

Its a great system. Problem is that I'm going off for an internship this summer and want to travel light, but I love my power!

I am totally conflicted though with choices out there, I could swing an expensive laptop, I was looking at the Dell XPS gen 2, or the 9300 if I wanted something a little cheaper. But I have a friend who runs Half-life2 at a pretty good resolution on their IBM T-42, and thats a lot cheaper.

I can justify price, if its worth it. I have never owned a laptop, build my own PCs, but now I find myself really needing that portability. Besides games I use photoshop, illustrator, flash, and a little maya. I never worry about these things running on my PC, but I'm not sure what specs would be low, mid-range, and high for a laptop.

Also there is the battery and weight factory, how long is good for one of these to last? I mean if I was just using word on the XPS does that mean it still would only give me 2 hours?

And God forbid, everybody I know uses an Apple notebook, unless I hear otherwise I fear the compatability issues...

 

[Karma Police]

Go to notebookforums & read up there, it's much better than here.

BTW I would wait as long as I could until I made a decision. There are major changes in interfaces (PCIe, Turion, Sonoma chipsets) underway.

 

[Dio]

I have a Pentium-M 1.6GHz with Mobility 9600 and 512M and it runs HL2 and CS:S pretty well. Battery life is about 2 hours min (3D games, big compiles) to a bit over 4 hours max (just about anything else). The updated similar models (it's about a year old now) mostly have 735 and Mobility 9700 for about £1000.

Screen quality would be a big issue for playing games, perhaps - this panel isn't anything like a desktop TFT for viewing angles (often deliberately low on notebooks for security reasons) or latency (I'd guess this is a 30-40ms panel). Try before you buy there, I'd say, if that's critical.