Buying a laptop; don't let me do anything stupid.

[Shinigami]

Hello all, I've been wanting a laptop for quite some time now, but never had the resources to obtain one. I recently started a new job so I plan on getting one soon.

I've been doing a lot of research and pretty much know what I want, but since this is a major purchase, and I won't be able to upgrade like in a desktop, I want to be certain before I buy anything.

First of all, what I want it for. While I'm not a 'hardcore' gamer, I will be gaming quite a bit, so I would like something that can run fairly new games on mid-high settings (My to-play list includes Portal 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Fable 3, The Witcher, Skyrim)

I'd prefer it to be a 17 inch, but if I could get a performance boost for the same price by getting a 15 inch I would. Battery life doesn't really matter.

My budget is the main problem. I'd rather not spend more than $700. As with the screen size, if I can get a major boost for an extra $50, I'll dish out the dough.

So I've been looking on Newegg and I kinda like the look of this:

Acer Aspire AS7741G-6426

The reviews are all good, however I keep hearing about how much Acer sucks, so that has me worried.

I've also been thinking of buying a used actual gaming laptop of ebay. Something like this:
Asus Gaming Laptop

I just think it would be hard to snag something like this for less than $800.

So what are your thoughts? I'd appreciate any recommendations and advice.

Oh, here are some miscellaneous questions that I'd like answered if anyone wouldn't mind:
1. After purchasing I plan on doing a fresh install of Win 7 to remove the bloatware. Is there any reason I should not do this?
2. A lot of the laptops I've been looking at come with 4 gigs of Ram. If I upgraded to 6 or 8 would there be a noticeable difference?


Thanks, hope you can help me out

 

[BrokenAtari]

Hello, buying an Acer is like playing Russian roulette. (Especially the aspire series.) Every Acer except for one that I've needed to repair had something wrong with the hinges or lcd screen. They use terrible screws that over time come loose and fall out. (I even saw a few with cracks starting to show up at the hinges like the Nintendo ds lites.) Those positive reviews come from people who haven't owned it for a year or 2. They are nice laptops until problems start occurring.

1. Yes it is a great idea to remove the bloatware by doing a fresh installation. The only time you would want to keep the bloatware is if it comes with blueray playing software.
2. 4 gigs of ram is fine. Unless you are going to be doing memory intensive things such as running 5 virtual machines at once; like I do. 4gigs is the perfect amount.

A amazing laptop is the gateway p-7805u fx. It plays every game I throw at it at max settings. Good battery life. I found one on ebay. Gateway P-7805U FX 17 inch Gaming Laptop + FL Studio 9 | eBay

 

[Shinigami]

That Gateway does look nice. I'm curious, what games have you thrown at it and do you have to lower the resolution to get good framerates? The reason I ask is because of a sentence from a Cnet review on the laptop: 'You'll still probably have to play most games at that lower resolution to crank up the details'.

Also, I really like the look of the Asus G73JH. There are quite a few on ebay going for 700-900 and they look incredibly nice. Anyone have experience with them?

​

 

[BrokenAtari]

Ive thrown Bad Company 2, Portal 2, Half life series 2 and 1, Dead Space 2, Starcraft 2, Warcraft III, Killing floor, Assassins Creed II, Left for dead 2 and various others. No, I play them at full rez of the screen. 1440x900. There were a few models of it that contained a much higher resoultion screen. However, I've played all those games max settings highest AA. Except for bad company 2 It will play with max AA however explosions make can sometimes be choppy. All those games play great no fps problems. It gets hot sometimes if it gets really hot it will underclock its self automattically.