Yellow-Asterisk

Hey folks, i'm in the laptop market. Looking for one to use for school and travel. I would like to be doing some light gaming, Mostly older games (Wolf ET, HL2 + Mods). Playability is key, i'm willing to take some degraded visual quality. My budget is ~1200 dollars. this includes some kind of warranty and accident coverage. I'll be carrying this thing around quite a bit, and i would hate to lose everything thanks to a rouge cup of coffee. Any ideas on where to shop? Currently i'm leaning towards a retail store. I'm having a hard time finding better deals online, plus when dealing with a warranty, i like to have a store to walk into and yell. Also any recommendations on hardware, or brands? PS since all new systems come with vista now. i will be installing Windows XP as soon as a buy it. Plus i'm looking at the 15 inch ones, for betting battery life and mobility.

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http://lavos.ytmnd.com/

"The electric Yellow's got me by the brain banana!"

=Sarc=

Check out the Dell laptops. They have some new 13" laptops (DX10 capable too but it's a lower end card) for roughly around your budget. The 15" laptops are in a decent price range too. It's too bad you weren't looking about a month or two ago when they were selling the old XPS 12" laptops for about $1000. Anyway, get a 9-cell battery with it and you'll have some great battery life and mobility.

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JO Guides & Tutorials
Team Element - It's who you game with.

Uranium - 235

I've had nothing but problems with my Dell laptop. In the year that I've owned it, I've had to have the motherboard replaced once and the video card replaced twice.

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Zoopy

I had the XPS 12" for a couple a months and it's preaty good. I can get about 5.5h of battery life while doing non-3D accelerated tasks (9-cell battery FTW). Although for some reason now it doesn't run as well as it did before. Perhaps it has to do with someone spilling Pepsi all over it (you know who you are).