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[The Niles]

I don't own a laptop but I am interrested in owning one. I am certainly not a position of buying one at the moment, I'm mearly orienting myself in the market. As an avid gamer I do want a laptop that can handle a game every now and then. In my searches I soon found that, for me, ASUS makes the best laptops. They are feature rich and decently priced. The only drawback I could find is an unimpressive batterylife (a little over two hours to a maximum of three). Right now I am very excited about this computer. It has a decent CPU, is centrino based (better batterylife) and has a great GPU for a laptop. It is not out yet but it is comming very soon and should cost around €1000 to €1300.


For people on a more restricted budget ASUS also has a good solution. This is not a centrino laptop and has a much slower CPU and a GPU that is no more then passable but then you pay a lot less. This one is already available and for a very reasonable €820 (in the Netherlands).

So what do you guys think? Do you own a laptop? If so what are its specs and what do think of laptops in general?

[Tom Henrik]

I have two laptops, and I find that they have served me well. I'm not an authority on laptops, though. I just know that one of them (an Acer TravelMate 2301LM) has never let me down thus far.

All the games I have bought have worked flawlessly on that one. Which is curious as I never ever read the requirements for any game that I buy. Probably due to me being a console gamer first and foremost. If I buy a PC game, I expect it to work with no fuss on my PC. So far it has.

Although, people constantly tell me that particular laptop sucks :bleh:



Here are the spechs, in case anyone is interested:
(The only spechs I understand is the screen size and that I have a CD... or maybe DVD... burner.)

Acer TravelMate 2301LM

• Intel Celeron M 320 processor
  (1.3 GHz, 400 Mhz FSB, 512KB L2 cache)
• 15.0" XGA TFT LCD
• 40GB HDD
• DVD-Dual (support DVD +- RW)
• 256MB DDR

I'm not sure why I have 256MBs worth of old German History stored in my laptop, but I am sure it serves a purpose... somewhere.

It also has a Spanish BIOS, which supplies me with lots of frustration, and sometimes laughs.

[A. J. Raffles]

Tom, your laptop is positively hi-tech compared to mine.:blink: I wonder what those people would say about my laptop, then. LOL Read and weep. Or laugh, if you prefer...

• Intel 82443BX Pentium II processor (I think. I've got no idea what that means, really)
• 13.1'' TFT thingy
• 11.2 GB HDD
• a floppy drive AND a CD-ROM drive
• an amazing 128.0 MB RAM
• 87 different keys - if I counted correctly, that is.

On top of which it weighs about twelve pounds.
I still love my laptop, though. Probably because I've had it for more than five years (which sort of explains the crappy specifics, I suppose).

[win98]

I had a pentinum2 laptop but i sold it for this pc.

[Rogue]

I have Dell's Inspirion 8500 (from work), which is one of bigger laptops, but with nice specs:

15.4" screen (1600x1050)
P4 2.4GHz
512MB RAM
40 GB Hard disk
64MB NVidia 4 AGP video card
DVD/CDRW combo drive

I had a lot of problems with screen, so they replaced almost all parts untill they figured out what's going on.

[A. J. Raffles]

I don't think anything beats my laptop so far. Yay. Have I mentioned that the battery needs to be recharged every 30 minutes?

[wendymaree]

I've got a laptop that I'm in love with. It puts up with a lot of punishment and still never fails. It plays every game that I've tried on it...even those with high requirements. Also the old windows games it plays with ease, too, even though I've got a XP OS...but this is mostly because I discovered a site that has patches enabling the games to work with XP.

The laptop has a Celeron processor which many people are critical of but I find much better than the old Pentium processor I had on my desktop. Although to be expected, I supppose. But the point is, this type of processor is excellent - not junk at all - and lowers the price on the laptop purchase significantly.

Eight months ago this laptop cost $1,400 and it's made by an Australian manufacturer: Optima.

Specs:

Widescreen: 15.4 inches
Celeron M Class processor 1.5 GHz
512 meg of ram
64 meg Intel video chip
Great sounding sound card although the laptop speakers leave something to be desired.
60 gig hard drive
DVD burner
PCMCIA slot - for which I brought a TV tuner card and also an audigy sound card for composing music with software that needs ASIO drivers
Wireless

[Timpsi]

I'm also a great fan of my laptop. While not nearly as modern as Wendy's, it is still enough to run the stuff I wish it to run (management games, emulators, DOSBox, the usual office software). Also, it server me in marvelous fashion when I was working abroad, and is a real life-saver during long trips by train. The only thing that is a big bummer for me is the poor video card, but that's how it is with cheap notebooks. Also, the keyboard layout is a Polish one, which causes some problems with the Finnish language. Got used to it quickly, though.

Actina is the brand. Bought it from a Polish computer store in April 2004, and managed to negotiate a very nice discount.

Specs:

- 2Ghz Celeron 2
- 256mb RAM
- SiS NB 650 chipset
- 14.1" screen
- CD/DVD/CD-RW drive
- 30GB hard drive

[Data]

It's funny to see that you list DOSBox seperately from the emulators. (as it is an emulator)

Anyway. I got a second hand laptop a few years ago

It's pentium I 100 Mhz with 64 mb ram

It runs win98 and debian linux with a self written Xinit script (no window manager) resulting is blazing fast system without any fancy stuff

It's been a while since I used it. But I use for it programming mainly.

[The Niles]

It's funny how you discribe a P1-100 system as blazing fast.

I was worried by the slow start of this topic that there where few people with a laptop on abandonia. I see many of the people who have a laptop even use it as their primary system. For me it will be secondary system unless I like it so much I replace my current desktop with it (which I doubt).