Buying a Laptop
 

I'm looking for a laptop and I'm not sure which one is good for its price and quality. My budget is under 900 after taxes.

I'll be mainly using it for school, surfing, msn, movies and some games (SC, CS, etc)

Do you guys have any recommendations?
Which brands are good?

Just a heads up if you want a laptop that can handle gaming, it's hard to find one thats sub-900 after taxes. You'd have to find a really good deal.

What I normally tell customers is to do shopping regardless of whether it's on sale or not. Find the brand (HP is 1, Dell is 2 in the world fyi) with the exact spec sheet that you want. Then when you're willing to buy, wait for it to fall into your budget and buy asap.

But to game decently, you're looking at buying a 9600GTM-ish type card which usually garners a 1000 price tag BEFORE taxes. There aren't any lower end cards that would suffice. Any integrated video solutions are pretty much out of the quetion as well (Intel GMA X3100, 4500HD, etc)

what about screen size?

I don't think i would need a graphics card in the 9600GTM-ish. Not going to be doing any crazy gaming.

And for screen size i'm looking at 14-15 inches

I have a sony SZ. I played SC WOW CS perfectly.
Put its probably out your price range. You can get a decent sony for 999

if you want to just be able to run cs and sc, any computer with an integrated card will do. hell my friends eee pc was able to run sc perfectly fine lol.

i still rmb i used to play SC on my 450mhz P3 comp... lol
but ya, any integrated card will run CS / SC... but if you were gonna go for CS:S or TF2, stuff like that will need a more powerful graphics card... and if you are going to buy something w/ a video card, may as well save up a bit more to get 9600M GT or above, since the differences are pretty big...

anything can run CS and WoW nowadays haha, or even CS:S, idk what SC is tho.

not true. I tried running cs:s on my gma x3100 and even with EVERYTHING on low and using a special cfg file for maximizing frames, i could only muster 30fps which dropped dramatically during game play.

don't trust those youtube videos that say they ran dust with 60 fps on their gmas. it just doesnt work.

there aren't that much in terms of dedicated video cards, but make sure if you want to do ANY gaming you look for a dedicated card. Just scanning through the BB/FS flyers there are some decent ones for 900. Any laptop with a dedicated card will be at the upper limit of your budget.

would a 9300m/9400m be like boarder line?

wierd, my POS desktop runs CS:S just fine, were you on wireless? idk why but Steam seems to hate wireless sometimes. regardless, I spent $900 to get my dv6424 last September with it on sale and it has a dedicated card and runs CS:S just fine. So I think he can get a laptop with a dedicated card for much less than $900 now.

I love my Toshiba...I've had it for 1.5 yrs and, aside from the occasional Vista-induced crash, it's been perfect. It was a display model I bought for $447, tossed an extra 2 gig stick of RAM in there (only came w/ 1GB) for $60 and it's been an amazing lappy...just my 2 cents :)

desktop > laptop for gaming. my pos desktop which is much slower than my laptop runs cs:s flawlessly. keep in mind most laptops are underclocked and undervoltaged compared to their desktop counterparts, and the graphics on laptops are not sufficient for it. this is from experience- c2d + gma x3100 = 30FPS MAX on cs:s on low settings all around.

as for a 9300/9400, it is definitely a step up from the gma. it is dedicated thus has its own processor and vram. it will game better than the x3100/4500HD, but dont expect too many frames still.