Can anyone help me out on what kind of gaming notebook to buy? I'm going into college, and I need a notebook that will keep me gaming for four years. The problem is... I know next to nothing about what to get. I'm not even sure about what specs are top of the line for a notebook these days.
My budget is somewhere in the ballpark of *$2000-$2500. I don't need the most cutting-edge machine available, but it's got to last me four years. It'd be nice to finally play Crysis (or at least TF2 with all the bells and whistles turned on).
I'm helpless on my own, please help!D:
edit: apparently "notebook" sometimes means mini-laptop. I use notebook as a synonym for laptop.
The biggest problem your likely to have is the computer lasting 4 years as a gaming machine. Laptops as a rule are nowhere near as powerful as desktops, obvious but still...Just as an example, look at some 4 year old laptops, their not very good, I have a 6 year old one and honestly...its a piece of shit. So...I really don't give you good odds of finding a laptop that can keep up for 4 years, likely the best start would be to aim high where it counts. Namely the processor and the video card, id say a quad core at 2.4 minimum, and ill admit that for the video card I don't keep up to date on mobile video cards. If you can wait a bit I expect ddr3 ram coming to laptops before too long.
Then there are two other considerations, battery and size. I honestly don't care if you think you will be able to plug it in most of the time when you are using the laptop, there will still be times when you wish you had better battery life. A 17" gaming laptop can usually expect less then an hour of full power gaming on battery, and that deteriorates over time. Aside from this, you will not easily find a good internal battery, that 9-cell lithium battery? Childs play, my 14" gaming laptop gets maybe an hour of battery life on that same type of battery. What I would recommend is investing in a good quality external battery.
In terms of laptops today, mine as an example:
Its an 14" asus, running on a dual core 2.0 processor and a 8650M GT video card, with 4gb of ram, the flaw being that I cheaped out on the screen and it maxes out at 1280 x 800, still perfectly fine for gaming, but doing other things its a little irritating. Anyways, it cost me about $1200 canadian and will max out tf2 and l4d.
oh and for your reference
a laptop/ notebook tend to be 13-18" and have processing power that can potentially rival a desktop
a
netbook would be the minilaptop your thinking of