Need a laptop capable of gaming..suggestions?

Question

I'm looking to buy a laptop at a fairly decent price. I'm a college student, so I'm poor. However, I can save up if necessary. I'll be using it for the internet, word processing, gaming, photos, and music. My present desktop is this: Hewlett Packard-Pavilion AMD Athlon(tm) XP 3000+, 2.10 GHz, 448 MB of RAM, 60 GB. I'm looking for something similar, but my desktop can't play some of the games that I want, still. I'm pretty computer illiterate, so I don't know what the best deals are. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

If you are poor, skip the laptop and upgrade your desktop. Laptops are disproportionately expensive.

Your processor is good enough. More memory might help, and memory is dirt cheap these days. The thing you probably need is a good graphics card. Your games that don't run probably have minimum requirements. Check those out, and get the best card you can afford that meets or exceeds those requirements.

Answer 2

ha..ha.. (I'm a college student, so I'm poor.) that was funny....

Anyway, the other guy is right. All you need is to change your AGP and things will be just fine. The current AGP that you have may not have pixel and vertex shader pipelines, so games like DOOM3, RIDDIK, ALIAS, Call of Duty 2 doesnot work. Move to Nvidia Geforce 6600 or 6800, or ATi 9600 XT or 9800 PRO or XT. These shouldn't be that expensive, atleast way less expensive then buying a low end laptop.

If you prefer to buy a laptop that is gaming capable. You have to go with
1. Dell Inspiron E1705 ( Uses ATi x1400) = $ 919
2. Dell XPSTM M1210 (Nvidia Go 7400) = &1200
3. Toshiba Satellite P100 (Nvidia 7600 128 MB) -> i support this=$1044

Answer 3

Depends on how muc hyour willing to commit. The Intel Duo Cores are really promising right now, i even have one myself and love it. But hold off till end of August as a new line is coming out from Intel as well as Athlon is releasing their Turion 2 processors.. But if your in a hurry try www.lge.com and look at the LG P1 Express, a very powerful laptop for workd processing and the top games of today, it'll play Half-Life 2 with no slow downs and all the bells and wistles on full...