New Laptop?

hardwired112

Baseband Member
Messages
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I'm thinking about getting a new laptop I will mainly use for gaming. The one I'm currently looking at is a Gateway M-150XL.

It comes with windows Vista, and combined with all its other problems, I've heard Vista dosen't perform as well as XP with gaming.

That being said, I'd like to put windows XP on this laptop, but I'm told by gateway that there is a "hardware incompatibility". Is this true? If someone could explain this to me I would greatly appreciate it.

http://www.gateway.com/systems/product/529667510.php
 
I don't see the hardware compatibility on there, but you should get Vista. They have wide support now and I highly doubt you'll encounter any kind of compatiblity issues with games. They run just as fast.

From your existing build on that Gatgeway website, I strongly recommend you upgrade the hard drive to a 7200RPM drive. Bump up the CPU speed if you can. Most important of all, upgrade to the 9-cell battery. The 6-cell you have now won't last you 2 hours on battery power.

Everything else loooks ok. Is that a dedicated graphics card in there? I have no clue when it comes to ATi graphics. I'm assuming it's dedicated since it says it uses the PCI-express. In that case, it's better than interated graphics most laptop has. Plus, that's using a newer graphic chipset too so it's DX10 compatible.
 
If gateway isnt the way to go, does anyone have a specific laptop suggestion for around $1200 that will play recent games on normal settings?
 
I prefer www.dell.com. There are a lot of promos out right now. Check out their Inspiron line laptops. Highly configurable. 1420 series have smaller screens, the 1500 series get bigger and so forth. Their gaming laptops are the Dell XPS line which are pretty nice but a bit high. I would rather configure a regular Insprion with a dedicated graphics card and beef up the CPU and RAM.
 
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