Time for a new work and light gaming laptop

Gromky

Distinguished
Jan 29, 2009
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18,510
Well, my Gateway laptop turned 4 this month, and it's looking like it's time to take the old boy behind the barn and put him down. The abuse of traveling to work every day is really starting to show, and it hasn't been up to my needs for a while now.

I'm looking for a new laptop. It will serve as both a work and personal machine. Work is dealing with portrait/graduation/party photography, so the screen is reasonably important. I can live with glossy if it's necessary (harder and harder to find matte), since I won't be needing to do any extremely fine color correction on this machine and am usually in controlled lighting. It's mostly just basic processing of images, eye transplants/minor digital manipulation, and such. Setup for prints and more critical work will be done on other machines and monitors.


1_What is your budget?

Probably around $1,000 or so.

2_What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?

15" most likely. 17" might be better if it doesn't impact the price too much. Certainly not smaller than 15".

3_What screen resolution do you want?

Higher is better. I'm at 1280x800 on a 15.4" right now, and I would prefer higher resolution.

4_Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?

Probably closer to desktop replacement. It will be coming to work with me every day, but I don't mind extra weight and bulk.

5_How much battery life do you need?

Not a concern. I'm always plugged in, even our car is set up with a 110 outlet.

6_Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)?

I'd like to be able to play HL2 Episode 3 when it comes out (hard to spec for a game that has no release timetable). Otherwise I don't have any specific games I'd like to play, but I'd like the option. I've been playing more console games, and older games lately because going to the desktop takes me away from my wife and daughter. I really would like the best video card possible for the price.

7_What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo / Video editing, surfing the web, playing music, watching movies, Etc.)

A decent amount of Photoshop work. Mostly just photos, but the occasional document running into hundreds of mb. RAM is going to be important, especially if I'm saddled with Vista. There are good odds I'll be swapping it to XP at some point.

It will also be a web surfing/music/movie machine, but most of that will probably be done in Ubuntu.

8_How much storage (H.D.D Capacity) do you need?

Not a ton. Most everything is stored and backed up externally. Two hard drive bays would be nice, but it seems like that's very uncommon these days, and I wouldn't really pay more for it.

9_If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post the links to them.

The standard ones. Newegg, Mwave, Tiger Direct, etc. If the price was worth it Costco, the big retailers, manufacturers, etc.

10_How long do you want to keep your laptop?

Considering how long I've been using this one, a while.

11_If you would like to mention some other things about purchasing your ideal laptop, post them.

I think I'm more concerned with video card than processor. I can't think of a ton of other things that concern me.

12_Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons.

Nothing specific. This Gateway hasn't held up as well as I would like, it has some design issues. Mostly it comes down to specs for the money

13_What country do you live in?

The US.