Good morning all, im asking all my family for money for x-mas and will put it into a laptop so i thoguht i would start to reasearch now. I know nothing about them, i am a computer tech and know alot about desktop/servers/networking etc but nothing mobile. So i will tell you guys what i need the laptop to do and then we can decide what i need. Budget less than $850, prefer $700 or less but willing to pay more if i can get more laptop for the money by stepping up to a higher end system.
Must be able to do following tasks, will list a % of time spent doing them to give idea:
10% - Use emulation software to play old Genesis, SNES games(I think even those super slow intel atem? atom? CPU's can do this right?)
60% - Play compressed HD video, 1080P(this will be the biggest CPU/VGA intense task i think)
- Have a 1366 x 768 res screen.
- HDMI out that works for audio and video
10% - Play older games, by older i mean HL 2 era, not DOOM 1 era(not to hard to do is it?)
20% - Office apps, browsing(will use openoffice)
- Being linux compatable would be a huge + but i can live with MS if i have to. Would prefer coming loaded with win 7 so i can try it out, dont really like vista.
That out of the way i prefer AMD/ATI over intel, i think this is because every friend i have spoken to said the intergrated Intel graphics(herd 4500M mentioned alot) i will find in this price range really suck, like badly, like not even funny badly. And that going with a ATI VGA chipset would be (like 5x better) better if i plan to do any gaming. And i think this means i would need to get a AMD CPU based system, which funny enough everyone tells me Intel mobile CPU's are better so i dont really know what to do, i think i would sacrifice CPU to get better VGA.
Things that do not matter AT ALL to me:
- Battery life(will be used 99% of time at work, 3 ft from wall socket)
- HDD size(have multiple USB HDD's/Memory stick)
- Upgradeability, if it has 2GB + of ram ill be happy.
- Multi core(i dont care if it has 1 fast core, 2 slower cores, or 200 really slow cores, as long as it can do what i want)
Any suggestions?
Must be able to do following tasks, will list a % of time spent doing them to give idea:
10% - Use emulation software to play old Genesis, SNES games(I think even those super slow intel atem? atom? CPU's can do this right?)
60% - Play compressed HD video, 1080P(this will be the biggest CPU/VGA intense task i think)
- Have a 1366 x 768 res screen.
- HDMI out that works for audio and video
10% - Play older games, by older i mean HL 2 era, not DOOM 1 era(not to hard to do is it?)
20% - Office apps, browsing(will use openoffice)
- Being linux compatable would be a huge + but i can live with MS if i have to. Would prefer coming loaded with win 7 so i can try it out, dont really like vista.
That out of the way i prefer AMD/ATI over intel, i think this is because every friend i have spoken to said the intergrated Intel graphics(herd 4500M mentioned alot) i will find in this price range really suck, like badly, like not even funny badly. And that going with a ATI VGA chipset would be (like 5x better) better if i plan to do any gaming. And i think this means i would need to get a AMD CPU based system, which funny enough everyone tells me Intel mobile CPU's are better so i dont really know what to do, i think i would sacrifice CPU to get better VGA.
Things that do not matter AT ALL to me:
- Battery life(will be used 99% of time at work, 3 ft from wall socket)
- HDD size(have multiple USB HDD's/Memory stick)
- Upgradeability, if it has 2GB + of ram ill be happy.
- Multi core(i dont care if it has 1 fast core, 2 slower cores, or 200 really slow cores, as long as it can do what i want)
Any suggestions?
