PC gaming help

Well, as much as I agree with Brett that in a year or two the technology landscape will have changed a lot I will help you out a bit with your search for information. What are you actually looking at buying? Building a desktop? Buying a laptop?

By that do you mean assemble the laptop yourself or get a company to do it for you? Also I think those custom computers are reasonable heavy and large due to the nature of custom computers. Laptop brand-wise I would stay away from Dell, two of my friends have XPS's and they have hardware trouble more frequently than any others I've seen. ASUS actually seem to be pretty good at the moment also Acer I believe are reliable. However do not expect as long a lifetime out of a Windows laptop as you would have had out of your Mac, as much as I prefer Windows over OSX one thing that Apple does well is keeping the user interface smooth for a long time after the hardware is outdated. However contrary to what I have just said I have an old HP laptop that is from late 2009 and still runs smoothly (can't game obviously), although the battery lasts literally 10 minutes and the boot-time is terrible but both of those are easily fixable. A lot of people say HP is not good though so I think I may have just got lucky. Am I on the right track with the sort of info you're looking for?

Sorry for essays lol

Apple seem to really be able to optimise their Operating Systems really well so that it appears that everything is smooth, ie on iOS devices when you open an app it plays an animation of the app enlarging from the icon on the homescreen to take up your whole screen, this is actually to disguise the fact that the device cannot open the app instantly and actually takes about half a second to open it, Google does the same for android but you can disable the animation and it just makes the whole experience seem laggy and unpleasant. Back on topic, a general life span for a Windows laptop is say 3.5 years I realise that's pretty short compared to Macbooks but that's how it is generally, if you clean the fan out and take care of the laptop like I do to mine it should last an extra year lets say (by take care I mean don't clog the fans up so it heats up, heat is a killer). Reliability on laptops generally is very dependent on how the user treats their machine, if you put it on soft material a lot, it is more likely to heat up and clog the fans with dust which will dramatically decrease the life span. Another thing is Macbooks aren't as amazingly reliable as you may think, they do break, admittedly not as much as Windows ones but I have many break within a year because of overheating (my friend has his on his bed/lap non-stop so it just overheated and died). Remember none of the reliability is actually down to Windows (the OS) but down to the hardware manufacturer, how well its put together, what parts they use, etc

Compressed air is good for laptops because you can't actually get into the fan itself so just blowing it out every few months is good. Quality wise there aren't any components you should stay away from given you are buying a laptop because the manufacturers generally put the same sort of components in at each price point. If you're looking for battery life being good you should definitely get an nVidea gpu because they switch between the dedicated gpu and integrated gpu when the dedicated is not needed, this saves battery life a fair bit. Also wait for the next line of intel CPUs because they are going to have a MASSIVE power saving, the largest power cut from generation to generation, my guess is maybe even a 60% battery life increase but that's a complete guess.