It depends upon how you treat it. Laptops are designed to be move around, but still moving them around a lot could eventually cause problems. The most likely part to go first is the hard drive, as they have a moving head and if it crashes the hard drive could be damaged.
If your laptop stays in one place then it most likely should give you years of use.
Corporations tend to refresh their laptops every three or four years. Usually, they buy them with a three year warranty and once the warranty expires feel the need to upgrade. They continue to improve and change their software, so often need newer hardware. Microsoft pushes the latest OS and since their latest OS's often require upgraded hardware they sometimes have no choice.
Consumers on the other hand, often have simpler needs. Browse the web, e-mail and typing letters or simple spreadsheet. They will often get many years use of a refurbished laptop, as their needs do not change that quickly.
It used to be that a floppy disk drive (FDD) was used for backup and sometimes transporting files. These days many laptops do not even include a FDD.
The easy to use USB thumb drives are great for backing up your laptop. The latest ones are 8GB and you can expect 16GB by the end of 2006. That is a huge amount of data. Another use is to transport files from one computer to another. There are also USB devices that have built-in security that can protect your laptop.
Have your wallet wide open. Gaming laptops can be expensive. Dell purchased the famed game laptop computer Alienware in March 2006.
The first thing you should do is check out the Minimum Systems Requirements for your favorite games. Once you have done that you should have an idea what hardware and computing power will be required.
A major component in a gaming laptop is a quality of the video chip. The video card needs at least 128mb of RAM and have a fairly good processing speed. It would also be nice if it was in a socket, so it could eventually be removed and upgraded.
The amount of system RAM the notebook has is critical. A decent gaming notebook needs at least 1gb of RAM or more if possible. I recently upgraded our desktop at home for a game my son likes that required 2GB of RAM.
Speaking of the CPU get the fastest and latest chip available.
If you laptop will be moving around then battery power might be important. A decent video card, fast CPU and lots of RAM will burn the juice. You should even consider a second battery or a unit that accommodates a second battery in one of the bays.
