Looking for development laptop w/ medium gaming

firefreek

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Sep 11, 2009
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18,510
Hi, I'm looking for a nice laptop for college! Does anyone know any good deals?

1. What is your budget? ~$1000 2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering? 15.6" 3. What screen resolution do you want? 1080p 4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop? Portable enough to carry in college, but I can deal with slightly heavy 5. How much battery life do you need? 2-3 or more 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)? Portal 2, TF2, Left 4 dead 2: HIGH Maybe: Borderlands Skyrim :MEDIUM-LOW

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.) Programming and development. I'm primarily a Java developer, but I do a little web development and other things. As far as gaming goes, nothing too intensive, but I'd like a relatively decent gfx card. 8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need? 500gb, at the very least 320gb 9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links. Amazon, newegg, tiger direct, fry's, and other big name stores 10. How long do you want to keep your laptop? All through college, perhaps longer, so long term. 11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ? Basic DVD burner will do, although Bluetooth would be nice. 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. Like:ASUS Dislike: Dell, Sony(bad experiences) 13. What country do you live in? USA

Other requirements: core i7 2ghz+, 6gb+ ram(4gb if there are 4 memory slots) also I'm not the one paying so don't skimp out on parts, but do find the best value.
 

bheadrick

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Feb 7, 2012
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Those look more like hardcore gamer laptops...

I've gotten quite a bit of good performance out of my acer aspire one netbook, which obviously isn't up to spec for a development laptop, but it leads me to believe that a larger laptop in their aspire line would.

Acer Aspire AS5750-9422 15.6-Inch Laptop

It's an i7 with 4GB ram, display is only 1366 x 768, though. Intel graphics w/ 128MB ram.
I don't personally own this or know anyone that does, though.
 

k1114

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http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834127570

This closer fits what he wants, 1080p, plays most games at a decent fps/quality, at the price he wants. The only thing is the size is 16.4 and ram. I don't really pay attention to amount of ram because it's so much cheaper to buy it yourself.

If you can deal without 1080p, there's this for $800, i7 with 555m. http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/catalog.workflow:category.details?current-catalog-id=12F0696583E04D86B9B79B0FEC01C087&current-category-id=F41BC8E1656C5F85171FBDB172571912

Here's 540m benchmark.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-540M.41715.0.html
Those games are pretty low graphic requirements other than skyrim which the intel graphics won't be able to handle. And also the hd 3000 has no vram, they use ram as vram.