I'm looking at buying a new laptop before I finish highschool this year, one that I can use for both gaming and school. I went to a small-ish computer store to get a quote from a place called "Canada Computers" (anyone dealt with them before? they have about 7 stores).

Anyways, they let me design the system I wanted and gave me a quote:
AMD 64-bit 3000+ Mobile
1gig (2x512) of DDR400
Fugitsu 40GB harddrive (5400 RPM)
ATI Radeon 9700 (128 mb built-in)
DVD/CDRW
Built-in-wireless etc.

It comes with "1 Year Parts and Labour" (whatever that means) which I'll ask them about.

They would assemble it from a "barebones" laptop from Asus which is identical to this one. (except for hd, ram, and processor)

My current laptop is about the same size but slightly lighter, but I'm just going by the measurements, they didn't have one in the store for me to look at.

Anyways, the store seemed a lot better than most of the small computer stores I've been in.

The quote they gave me was $1,513 CDN = $1,230.93 USD.

Any thoughts on the specs (and especially the ups and downs of the laptop itself) would be greatly appreciated.

Sounds like a great deal to me. Only downsides I've seen about my laptop (had it for 4 years) is that it can be too heavy to carry around for any length of time. Also, battery life sucks if you don't buy new ones every year or so. But that all depends on which laptop you get.

Laptops for school sound like a great idea, and they are for a while, but I found it to be more a pain than any kind of help. Now, if you happen to have desktop as your primary rig and an older laptop to take to class or whatev, that works the best.

Yeah, I've got a desktop in my room for my gaming rig and a Toshiba Portege to bring to class. It's a lot smaller and lighter than the average laptop, and has an 8-hour battery life, so it's super convenient. Though it's only a 1.2ghz processor, with no video card worth writing home about. Still, it's good for taking notes or playing Snood in class when the lecture gets boring (or Morrowind if it gets really boring).

Yeah, that's a pretty good deal. I paid $2100 CAD for my 1.5ghz Pentium-M, and I only have a Radeon 9200 and 512 mb of RAM. I do have a 80gb 5400 rpm HDD, though. This was back last August.

I have no problems with my laptop being my primary comp. I just use it as a mobile desktop mainly and bring my Axim X50 along to class if I need it. Works quite well.

My laptop is my only computer. I take it to some classes where I can have any powerpoint notes on my computer in advance, or if the class is boring and i need something to amuse so I don't fall asleep.

I can take it to the library to work on a report, or to my friends place to show them things that I have done.

I take it when I go back home to visit, because my old PC at home is a terrible pile of crap. So it's really good that I can bring mine with me.

Heavy laptop use just shortens it's life. My cooling went to **** on mine after a few years, and it's not something you can easily repalce.

Well I'm not going to buy a laptop and not use it.

My friend had a laptop they he used all the time, and it was many years old. Actually the thing that died on it, was it's monitor.

The cooling on mine died - I posted a thread on it a few months back in the tech forum: cost me £20 for a new one - I dropped it in the shop at 9, and had it back by 3.

*shrug*

My Lappy (Geoff) is far superiour to my desktop (Akhbar), but when I'm at home with access to the desktop I use it far more than Geoff. I tend not to game much, in fact the only game I have installed on either machine is Discworld noir which I'm gonna have to abandon today anyway (My girlfriend is coming today, and we go back to uni on wednesday).

I can't remember the last game I bought new... probably was Deus Ex which runs fine on both machines.

My laptop and my desktop are pretty much identical (Pentium 4 3.4GHz, 1 GB RAM, Radeon 9800 Mobile vs. Athlon XP 3200+, 1 GB RAM, Radeon X800 Pro), but my laptop has a 15.4" WUXGA LCD monitor while my desktop has a slowly dying 22" CRT that's blurry, dark, and tinted red. Also its USB ports are fried and I don't know why.

I want to build a 64-bit machine anyway. I'll probably use that one as a server/firewall or keep it around for remote debugging (which is all I use it for now anyway).