Solved! Need Help Choosing a Couple Laptops

[Riizu]

1. What is your budget?
Oh...400-700 dollars probably.
2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?
Probably a portable. From what ive seen, somewhere in the 10-13in I believe.
3. What screen resolution do you want?
Nothing to specific. Something that is decent. 1024x768 or better.
4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?
Portable
5. How much battery life do you need?
Something to last throughout a college day.
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)?
For my girlfriend, Sims is a MUST. (Go figure ) For myself, I don't expect anything serious. Maybe SC2, or WoW, or D3. Oh, and Minecraft would be great, though performance seems to really very on that.
7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.)
Some light video editing for YouTube, college work, and watch some movies.
8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?
Probably 300-500gb. This could vary.
9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.
Newegg or Amazon are always good.
10. How long do you want to keep your laptop?
3-4yrs.
11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ?
DVD ROM/Writer for sure.
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.
Not too picky. I believe reviews speak for themselves, but Dell DOES seem to be very overpriced.
13. What country do you live in?
USA
14. Please tell us any additional information if needed.

Hey Guys, looknig for some advice on purchasing two laptops, or at the very least one. Christmas is coming around, and my girlfriend is in a terrible situation computer-wise. As she continues on through college, id like to get her something that would allow her to do what she needed with college, as well as provide her the ability to actually have her own PC. The other one would be for myself, serving pretty much the same purpose, but a little bit more geared towards gaming. As well as this, I know that im about...4 months early, but i'll be leaving for military training in October, so i'd like to make sure I make the right choice.

 

[AntiZig]

Hi, umm have you done any looking around for what you're asking?

you want a CD-rom in a 10"?

I'll give you a few options and let you figure out what's more important.

-Toshiba 14" - $630, AMD A6. This is what I'd recommend for the price range as it will be able to run SC2 smoothly on very low, but this is a 14" laptop and it will not last 8hrs on battery.

so going down to 13" range
-Asus 13.3" - $620, i3-370+310M this should be able to run SC2 on low as well. (you can see the pics here)
-MSI 13.3" - $580, ancient processor, but should be able to run SC2 hopefully. Unfortunately this one doesn't have cd-rom. But it can run up to 10 hrs on battery.

and here we go to 11"
-HP 11.6" - AMD dual core with 6310, it will struggle to run SC2, I think. It's only $470 and battery said to be up to 9 hrs.

I won't go down to 10" netbooks, because simply lets face it, those aren't meant to run video games.

 

[Riizu]

Thanks for the response!

In that list, the one I had seen before was the HP 11.6". Currently, thats like CNet's new favorite for college laptops.

In terms of gaming, SC2 would be nice yes, but I understand that you cant game on a laptop. I'll be bringing my desktop with me when I start college next fall semester after my Military Training. Ideally, I would really just like something that could perhaps run Minecraft for myself, maybe some WoW. As for my girlfriend, like I said, running Sims is a must.

Thanks for all your ideas.

 

[AntiZig]

oh it's not an issue of whether you can game on a laptop or not, it's your parameters.

if you were to bump up your size to 14" and up the budget to about $900 you can get a great low end gaming laptop, but with those you sacrifice the battery time for game performance.

Ideally, I think your requirements are perfect candidate for AMDs new A-vision series llano processors, but unfortunately we haven't seen them in anything below 14". Perhaps in a few months something will come up.