new laptop computerFollow

I am in the market for a new laptop computer to play EQ on; however, I am far from being up to date on what I should be looking for in a quality laptop.

If anyone can point me in the right direction where I can get the most bang for my buck it would be appreciated. Also if you could list the min specs I am going to need to run EQ wide open that would be great too.

Intel or AMD
how fast
RAM
Video card
raid 0 or not
how large of a hard drive

Thanks for your help in advance.

I have a 2 year old Compaq Presario R3000. It has an ATI video card with 64mb dedicated (not shared) memory. It came with 512 MB of memory and has a 2.0ghz processor. Out of the box it ran EQ just fine (and still does). However, it was a bit laggy, esp in PoK and on raids. So, I upped the memory to 1.5gb and that cleared up most of the lag.

The key to buying a "gaming" laptop is to realize that you are really after a "portable" desktop that can't easily be upgraded (outside of memory).

What I did when researching which laptop to buy was to go to several websites like.. http://h18000.www1.hp.com/ and www.dell.com and compared laptops on as close to an apples to apples basis. These sites make it pretty easy, you just choose your base system and then add/upgrade the features you want and compare the price. When doing this. Start with the base system that has the fastest processor AND best available video card (currently looks like 128mb dedicated). Then add the features you want. The more memory the better, but keep in mind that you can upgrade that at a later time. The hard drive is another area that you might want to spend a little more on at first.

Anyway, hope this helps..

Thanks for the input guys think I am going to end up getting an Alienware Laptop. They seem to give the most bang for the buck.

Still deciding on whether to get 1 GB of Ram or 2. It has upgrade slots so that I can buy and put more in if needed so leaning toward getting just 1 now seeing how it goes.

I checked out acer's computers and could not find one with the vid card used in alienware.

Area-51m 7700 ATI MOBILITYâ„¢ RADEON X800 with 256MB of DDR 3 memory
Area-51m 7700 NVIDIA GeForceâ„¢ Go 6800 Ultra with 256MB of DDR3 memory
Area-51m 7700 NVIDIA GeForceâ„¢ Go 6800 with 256MB of DDR3 memory


But I only spent 10 mins on it. I am curious to find out if you could get a laptop with the same specs especially the vid card and same quality and warranty and save some $$.

Edited, Mon Aug 15 13:03:04 2005 by fhrugby