laptop advice

[Jadis]

Im considering buying a laptop but i know essentially nothing about them. The main reason i want one is that as a university student, the next few summers will be spent away from my family while i work. For this reason i obviously need something portable to keep connected to home. Also, keeping connected at school is very important during those long, late afternoon lectures when you'd rather be cruising a board somewhere.

and then of course there's gaming...

I'm not much of a hardcore gamer any more but i would like to get a laptop thats reasonably up to date yet cost effective.

Any suggestions? Is there a brand thats better respected over others?

thanks in advance

[Palehorse]

Whatever you decide on, make sure you get a three-year parts + service full warranty. Laptops have a much higher failure rate than desktops so get the warranty. I deal a lot with Dell and can say they do a good job and are very timely when it comes to warranty repair.

You'll get a lot of opinions on laptop features in this thread so I'm just going to put one here: make sure the laptop has a physical on/off switch for the wireless card.

[Mykos]

http://www.msimobile.com/level2_productlist.aspx?id=6

I have looked at these several times and when its time to get a new laptop, it will be one of these.

[ThaMan]

Video is pretty much the bottleneck in the laptops. If you want to do any gaming at all, plan on spending over $1000 bare minimum. Keep an eye on the video cards.

HP is what I use personally and I have everyone at work with a laptop using HP. They are pretty good. I've only had one die, and they fixed it within 2 days under warranty. And I don't have the extended warranty because some of HP's business laptops come with a 3 year mail in warranty, but they do ship you a box when and if it crashes.

The only difference with HP's home and business lines, that I can tell, is with the business line, you get the software CD's with the system.

Oh, and I'd go with 3 or 4 gigs of ram. Make sure you can buy a memory chip for the system after you get it. It's usually a lot cheaper to add the chip yourself, on any system you choose. The system I bought came with 2 gigs of ram, and I added a 2 gig chip to it.

[Deviq]

I bought my wife this Toshiba (http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/toshiba-satellite-a305-s6916/4505-3121_7-33496204.html) for only $800. It actually plays most of my games with decent frames and we're very happy with it. I'm not too sure about the portability, though. It's not nearly as bad as a normal gaming laptop but no where near a netbook.