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I'll be heading to college in September and I needed to buy a good laptop. I'm looking for something that is relatively light and durable with decent battery life but also with (preferably good) gaming capabilities. My price limit is around $1500 maximum. I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations or suggestions, or any experiences with laptops that I should consider. Thanks.

If your limit is around $1500, that's enough to buy parts for a decent gaming computer that can run Crysis well that will sit in your dorm or apartment and still buy a decent netbook to take around to class with you. The best part is, you'll still have money left over. If you include a 22" monitor with that, you should just hit $1500 depending on whether of not you have a case, PS, and OS sitting around already.

I suggest this because any desktop is easy to upgrade and is significantly better than any laptop you can get for a greater price. The netbook is handy to take around to class, take notes on, and access the internet; it's also anywhere from 2-4 times lighter than any notebook that can run games reasonably.

Frisbeetarian wrote:I suggest this because any desktop is easy to upgrade and is significantly better than any laptop you can get for a greater price. The netbook is handy to take around to class, take notes on, and access the internet; it's also anywhere from 2-4 times lighter than any notebook that can run games reasonably.

Exactly what I'm planning on doing; though I'll be in graphic design, so I'm not sure that really requires a laptop to take notes with. Oh, and minus the $1500 limit for me, haha..

But yeah, I'd go with what Frisbee' said - that way you'll have a sweet gaming computer, and a portable laptop which you can fool around on in class (who takes notes? ...joking)

My suggestion is - Don't buy it from the company themselves

Unless you want to waste $$$. Such as Dell, they are so overpriced its insane. That was my mistake. You can pick up the same PC at a good online store for a lot less than what you would pay buying it directly from the company themselves. If you were interested in a desktop I would suggest building you own but since its a laptop it gets a little more complicated. What I would do is do some searching around online. A really cool site that sells electronics (mostly PC's and PC parts) is TigerDirect.com. You won't find much stuff lower than what they have it and so far they've been really great. So I would browse around there and you should be able to find a decent PC that can play almost any game for around $600 or less.

I would suggest an HP laptop. They seem to have the best quality stuff of all the brands these days.

Hebes24 wrote:I would suggest an HP laptop. They seem to have the best quality stuff of all the brands these days.

I agree with that. Although I'll be using a Mac for college, I've always had good experiences with HP products.

EDIT: In terms of price, make sure you do a lot of poking around. Some companies will give discounts or promotions if you're buying the computer for educational purposes (like going to college). This is my example from buying a Mac, so it may not really indicate what you'll be able to find, but I was able to get $100 off the price and a free iPod touch. Also take a look at your school's website. There will probably be a page for the IT department that gives recommendations for specifications you may need to meet or where to buy from.

Yeah, if you're going with a laptop, HP is great. Cheap, yet not low quality. You can get a good laptop which will run games pretty well for under $1500 for sure. ...Or you could get a desktop and netbook

yeah. I think I'm going to stick with just a laptop. I don't expect to be playing games a lot, so I don't think I would use a desktop often. I will look into HP. I have heard that gateway also makes well priced laptops. Thanks for all the advice.

My experience after about a year with my Gateway laptop isn't great. For $600 after a bunch of discounts at a store, I got:

Turion 64 x2 2GHz
4GB DDR2
250GB HDD
15" screen

The keyboard and touchpad feel great, the screen's really nice, and it beats the [diet dr. pepper] out of any other laptops in its price range in terms of performance.

However: The whole thing feels really cheap. The power connector broke and has to be fixed every couple months with hot glue. One of the plastic supporting bits under the left touchpad button broke, so the button now rocks back and forth. One of the battery lock clips on the bottom broke off. It overheats and shuts down really easily, without a cooling pad it's hard to get the CPU temperature under 70 Celsius, and it's not hard to hit 80 if you do moderate processing with it sitting on your lap without a cooler. I once got it to overheat so much it shut itself down while playing Starcraft with nothing else open.

In my experience, Gateway laptops are built really poorly, and if my experience is what most people get, the computer itself will break before any of the components fail or you need a new one due to it being obsolete.

On the other side, my family owns 4 HP desktops, and all of them are still working perfectly and have had very few problems (the power button for the oldest one, which is 7 years old, is somewhat broken but still functional, and the 3 1/2-year-old one has had two hard drive failures, both covered by warranty and in both cases it was possible to transfer the data off). An HP will likely serve you quite well.

A Mac will perform well and the build quality will be outstanding, but you won't get as much in terms of hardware as you would with a PC and you'll need to learn a new OS (assuming you're currently a Windows person).

crazytieguy wrote:A Mac will perform well and the build quality will be outstanding, but you won't get as much in terms of hardware as you would with a PC and you'll need to learn a new OS (assuming you're currently a Windows person).

And you really won't get as much on a $1500 budget. I personally despise Mac computers- I don't mind the OS, but something about Apple's hardware always gets on my nerves- Probably the obsession with having ultra-thin laptops that usally proves to be a useless feature (in fact, a bad one if you aren't going to be traveling far distances with it a lot) as well as quite a few other things.

Thanks for the input on gateway. So far HP looks the best. I don't think I will be getting a Mac.

Fluffy_the_ic wrote:

crazytieguy wrote:A Mac will perform well and the build quality will be outstanding, but you won't get as much in terms of hardware as you would with a PC and you'll need to learn a new OS (assuming you're currently a Windows person).

And you really won't get as much on a $1500 budget. I personally despise Mac computers- I don't mind the OS, but something about Apple's hardware always gets on my nerves- Probably the obsession with having ultra-thin laptops that usally proves to be a useless feature (in fact, a bad one if you aren't going to be traveling far distances with it a lot) as well as quite a few other things.

Not necessarily. I have a MacBook pro, and it has a pretty darn good hardware setup. It has a 320GB 7200RPM hard drive, 4GB of RAM, an upper mid-level nVidia integrated graphics card (GeForce 9400M). I have it Dual-booting with Windows, and it has been able to run pretty much any game short of Crysis beautifully. Mac hardware is just as good as any PC. Apple also recently reduced a lot of its prices, so MacBooks are cheaper now.

Now, if we're going to talk about the MacBook Air, I wholeheartedly agree. That thing is too thin for its own good, and does not have that much computing power, and I have no Idea why they made it, other than to have it as a proof of concept.

But, there's no need to start an argument. It's kaos' decision, and based on his last post, he seems to want an HP laptop, which is an excellent choice. I'm just saying, don't put Apple down without doing all the research.

Oh, lol. I wasn't saying teh hardware sucked- I was saying that they're just obsessed with having anorexic laptops. And I didn't know they reduced their prices.

My main computer is a Lenovo X61 Tablet. Being a tablet pc, I use a stylus to take notes by writing on the screen. It is way better then writing on paper. All your notes are stored in your PC, you can move/shrink sections, use different colors, etc... If you use Microsoft OneNote for note-taking, it records the audio along with what you write. Meaning you select a portion of your notes and it plays back what your professor was saying when you were writing that section. You can even convert the handwriting to text and search it (doesn't work too well with math notes).

I get about 3.5 hours of battery life in Windows and could squeeze it to 4 if I really had to. I mainly use Ubuntu (Linux has nothing to compete with OneNote), but that only gets 2.5 hours for some reason... I don't remember how much it weighs (something below 4.3 pounds). It isn't as heavy as other laptops and its fairly quite too.

I've been too busy with school work to do much gaming. Checkout the graphics chipset and see if its good enough for you. Laptops with dedicated graphics cards are normally considered 'desktop replacements'. They are light, heat up a lot, are loud, and have bad battery life. They weigh too much to really travel with them and use them on your lap.

Tigerdirect (also now owns CompUSA) is cheaper because they sell low quality components. I've gotten bad stuff from them that had to be returned. Everything is not always bad, but you do take more of a risk.

Don't forget to look into Fatwallet. I got 10% back on my laptop from them. Also, its often cheaper to buy the smallest hard drive space and memory, then upgrade them by buying the parts from some other store.

You can get a netbook for as cheap as $200, but you won't be playing games on it.

I don't really expect to be playing games often either. There will be more than enough work. The thing is my home computer is pretty bad, and I doubt my parents will be getting a new one, so I figured I would get a good all around laptop. But thanks for your advice, I will look into Tablet PCs.