I have an older Dell Inspiron 8100, 1GB RAM Laptop. I tried to load Quake 4 on it, and it really was awful! I am thinking about getting a new laptop, and I saw several "gaming" laptops. Besides being big and heavy, what is the difference between a normal laptop and a gaming laptop? Can I run Quake 4 on a $1000 standard laptop, or do I really need to fork out more for a gaming laptop?
A "gaming" laptop will typically have more aggressive clocks, but most importantly a bigger, more desktop-like video card. Unless you really like the gaudy look of gamer laptops though, you can potentially find a laptop with a decent video card onboard for $1,000 without much difficulty.
My brother has just bought a normal laptop, but uses it for gaming. On the same site, there were gaming laptops advertised with the same spec, but for a higher price! The laptop is: Intel 2.0Ghz dual core (not sure which) 2gb DDR2 RAM 320GB HDD nVidia 9600M Graphics chip 15.4" screen And it runs most games smoothly. It cost £560 from PCSpecialist.co.uk
This I really would recommend you just getting a normal laptop for gaming. I bought a $4k Dell XPS 1730 2 years ago. I've had the gfx card fail on me twice during that time. The thing about gaming laptops is that the components are likely to wear out more quicker than normal Desktops as they go through abit more rigorous work. When the part finally fails (usually the gfx cards) it will be difficult to replace the parts as they probably won't be making them anymore - Experience! If you really want to game i'd say get a desktop. If you really need the mobile factor just get a standard laptop.
