Well, a friend is, anyway. She's going to be travelling a lot, and wants a pretty good laptop for games and such. This is what she's looking at right now; Inspiron 9100, Pentium 4 3.0GHz, 15.4-in. WXGA, 512MB DDR 400MHz 2 DIMMs, 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9700, (Or I could go 256MB DDR ATI's MOBILITY RADEON 9800 AGP 8X Graphics [add $300]), 8x CD/DVD burner (DVD+RW/+R), 60GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive. That's $2,149 canadian (so somewhere like $1,750 US)

I think that's a pretty nice deal for a laptop, but I've never looked into buying one before. Anyone know of anything close to that level of awesomeness, but for cheaper? Any help is appreciated.

That looks great.

That's a good deal. The trick to buying a laptop is balancing size and weight vs. system specs. Do you know how much that laptop weighs?

Back in my day our laptops only had 8 meg of RAM, a 500 meg harddrive, and no sound card, and we thought that Windows 95 was far too new-fangled for us, and went back to the classic 3.11 for workgroups! And we LIKED it!

As much as Doom and Doom 2 got me through Year 11 English and Year 12 Information Systems (I still don't know what that last subject was supposed to be about), I've never understood preferentially playing games on a laptop. But if she's travelling around I guess it makes sense

That seems like a better computer than mine; unless she's wanting to play Half Life 2 whilst defragging, running IE and compiling linux, I think that should do.

I'm not sure about the price, though. When I bought a laptop 3 grand got me the computer I described at the top of the post... (well, I've had a couple of others, but that's the ancientest)

That Inspiron was TechTV's top pick for gaming, performance vs battery life vs screen size etc. if I'm not mistaken. Great gaming 'top. Not much you can get for cheaper that'll match that one.

My roomate has a laptop from GamePC. It's quite awesome. An Athlon 64 3200+, 1 GB of dual channel PC3200, a 7,200 RPM hard drive. The widescreen LCD is the best LCD I have ever seen on a laptop.

iBooks are nice too. (but not for gaming and for Windows-lovers, but good for mobility and media.)

That mother****er is 2 inches thick, and weighs in at close to nine pounds (the battery alone weighs almost half of that). A guy in my C++ class has the 9100. The battery has the subwoofer built in to it - yes, a laptop with a subwoofer! The battery lasts just barely over an hour.

I got the Compaq Presario X1460 for $100 less and with a free digital camera. Same specs, 'cept it has a mobile Radeon 9200, a 1.5 Ghz Centrino CPU, and a 80GB HDD. Battery lasts from 4 to 4½ hours.