If you are looking for a very light weight laptop for travel to browse the web, do word processing check your e-mail and play DVDs then check out the the HP nc2400 (DVD) or the Lenovo ThinkPad X60 or the Toshiba Portege R200. The Sony TX would be another choice, but it is expensive.
Dell announced in June 2006 an XPS starting at $3500 that has every feature that your desktop power user would want, including weighing almost twenty pounds. If you want to up the ante you can spend almost $5000. It includes or could include: blue tooth removable keyboard, carrying handle, webcam, eight speakers, optical DVD drive, 2.1GHz Duel Core CPU, 2GB RAM, XP Windows Media Edition, an ATI graphics cards and two 100GB Hard Drives. Wow! Everyone should have one or two of these. However, I'd be just as happy with the Toshiba Qosmio G35 that I have been eyeing the last few months.
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.
If you are looking for new I would look at the Lenovo (IBM) 3000 V100 and the HP NC2400 that sell for around $1500. These are new laptops that were recently manufactured and are both very light weight, less than four pounds. They have 12.1" displays and decent battery life. The Lenovo is higher performance but the HP has better battery life. The HP has 512 MB RAM, while the IBM 1 GB. If keyboard is important than is always tought to beat IBM since they perfected keyboards many years ago when they were the typwriter kings. The Lenovo uses a touchpad, while the IBM an embedded eraser head mouse. Both are great machines and I don't think you could go wrong with either one.
Got almost $4000 to spend? Lenovo introduced a dual-core 2.8GHz 1GB RAM Thinkpad with over 4 hours of battery life. A road warriors delight. It includes all kinds of wifi including Verizons 3G EV-DO, which costs by itself over $50 a month and is available in select US cities. It is targeted at corporations with enterprise ready security features, biometric fingerprint security, a 100GB hard drive and lots of other sophisticated features. A long ways from the refurbished laptops we sell at www.usedlaptops.com, but maybe we will see some in 3-4 years in the refurbished marketplace!
