B12's opinion on mobile desktops?
Good personal project, and great at lan parties with friends who like to complete for geekiness. And possibly a good option if you have a couple spare computers laying around that you don't mind cannabalizing for parts. But just ask yourself...if you're going to spend several hundred dollars on this, are you going to be happy with something that looks awful? And are you willing to risk your entire computer budget on something that might?
suggestions on laptops
I'm sure several people will be in here soon to suggest specific models, but here's my input:
* Be sure that it has external ports for
both a mouse and a keyboard. Gaming with a laptop keyboard and J-mouse is miserable. Some laptops only have one port to allow either/or an external keyboard or mouse. Be sure yours has one of each. Note that there is some flexibility here, since pretty much any new laptop will have at least one USB port that can be used for either a keyboard or mouse.
* While you're at it, be sure it has a 15 pin VGA port to allow use of an external monitor. This is fairly standard. I haven't seen a laptop without one for a while, but you may as well check to make sure.
* Pay close attention to the graphics chip. In my own experience, this is the number one source of problems: laptop manufacturers seem to heavily favor graphics chips that are incapable of random obscure things, or that show up on lots of hardware incompatibility lists. I don't know why. But it seems to happen often. Off the top of my head, I think I've seen more problems with NVIDIA GeForce chipsets than anything else.
* Get a display that you're comfortable with. Avoid screens that are hard to see, hurt your eyes, or fade at slight angles or with light on them.
* Personal preference: Given the choice of sturdy or slender, go sturdy.
* Leave room in your budget for a nice leather carrying case.
Better yet the laptop doesn't need to come with an OS,
through my school I can get Windows 7 Pro.
* Good luck buying a new laptop that doesn't already have an operating system on it
* Steal copies of all OSs you can, keep copies on CD for future use
* Running the newest operating system your machine can handle isn't always a good option. If your games will run on Vista, there's not much benefit to the additional overhead of running windows 7.