Looking for a new laptop

[xosder]

1. What is your budget? $500-600

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?15"+

3. What screen resolution do you want? Any

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop? Portable laptop for travel.

5. How much battery life do you need? 2-4hrs

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)? Only currently playing Swtor, would like to be able to play on low/med settings but laptop would mainly be used in hotels while away on business and hotel internet sucks anyways so I don't have high hopes.

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.) MS Office, maybe some AutoCad. Skype.

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need? Would prefer 500g+

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links. Fan of using Newegg or amazon but any good site will do.

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop? Couple years.

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ? Dvd is fine.

12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons. Liked a few Lenovo's I looked at but any brand is fine.

13. What country do you live in? USA east coast

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed. This would just be something to use while traveling not an everyday thing. I have a decent desktop for gaming but I'd like a new laptop for travel and some classes.

I liked the look of the Lenova V570 or the z575 but unsure how much a difference I'd notice between the two. I'd like to be able to run a few games on it but I don't expect it to look great doing it.

 

[Rockdpm]

Hmm thats gonna be a little tricky. But can be done...let me look through my treasure chest and see what i can pull out..

Well I have checked Newegg and Ebay and the real options you can get are really scrapping the bottom of the pool.

http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215245
Now unless you want Intel HD Graphics which idk how good it is but I am sure a Mobile Graphics Chip is better than Intel HD 3000.

Now it could work if your just gonna play low on everything. but eh it may be a extra 100$, but its almost impossible to even find a desktop for gaming for 300$. Since Most things seem to go up in price by about 10-15% when performance increase

 

[xosder]

It mostly be used for just web browsing and watching movies. But I'd like the option of logging into a game and messing around.

 

[blazorthon]

I'll look around some of the $500-$600 laptops, but gaming laptops are very expensive and perform worse than a PC with (on average) between a fourth and a half of the budget. You would need to play at significantly reduced settings and/or resolutions.

EDIT: Looking at the video card of the linked laptop in the above post, it has a Radeon 6650m... That is probably similar to the Radeon 6450, maybe a little faster, but at best isn't going to even come close to a $40-$60 desktop graphics card like the Radeon 6670. Considering that the Radeon 6670 is not enough for modern gaming, not even close, I'd think that you would need the top mobile 6700 or 6800 cards just to play at high settings and 720p, let alone your laptop's native resolution. Most laptops today have 1366x768 or 1600x900 or some similar resolution.

 

[xosder]

I'll look around some of the $500-$600 laptops, but gaming laptops are very expensive and perform worse than a PC with (on average) between a fourth and a half of the budget. You would need to play at significantly reduced settings and/or resolutions.

I'm more so looking for a general laptop that would play some games on low/med. I don't mind having to turn everthing way down to play something as long as it kills time.

 

[blazorthon]

I'm more so looking for a general laptop that would play some games on low/med. I don't mind having to turn everthing way down to play something as long as it kills time.

In that case it shouldn't be much of a problem. I wanted to make sure you knew that nothing in your budget would do too well for gaming. To be honest, even the top $4000+ laptops are beaten by $1000 desktops in gaming. The best mobile graphics configuration right now is SLI GTX 580ms and that isn't cheap. The other problem is that although they are priced like standard GTX 580s, even two of them in SLI are beaten by a single GTX 580 in a desktop.

For a mild gaming/general use machine, you could go for something with 3GB/4GB/6GB of RAM and a decent dual core CPU, i3 or better is recommended.

 

[xosder]

Two that have stuck out for me so far were
www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1783479&CatId=4938 and
www.bestbuy.com/site/Lenovo+-+15.6%22+IdeaPad+Laptop+-+6GB+Memory+-+500GB+Hard+Drive+-+Silver+Gray/4676403.p?id=1218505324513&skuId=4676403 though the price just went up on the latter. I do get a discount at HP and Dell but not a big fan of dell and have never owned an HP laptop.

 

[blazorthon]

I personally like Acer and Gateway. Dell, not so much. Dell seems to overprice stuff even more than their competitors. HP sends me these discount emails all the time after I signed up my HP printer, if you buy an HP don't sign up for anything unless you don't mind the spam. At least they didn't sell my email out to other spammers because I only get their spam and it's not too often they send it, but I'm not looking to buy right now and I'm actually looking into building my next laptop from a bare bones instead of buying a prebuilt anyway.

I've never had an HP computer so I can't vouch for them, but HP seems to be giving large discounts fairly often.