 | Quote: |  | | |  | Originally Posted by RedRozeWolF |  | | | | | | | | | Oh right, sorry, I guess that budget is important I'm looking at around $2,000 (possible student discounts?)
How's Sony or IBM? | |  | |  | |
As previously stated, IBM is now Lenovo, and I'm composing this message from my X31 ... it's about 4 years old, and still rocking.
(Avoid X4-series, however -- slow, non-standard
HD size, difficult to upgrade).
Anyway, as a Lenovo fanboy, I can only recommend them with the utmost happiness ... but I will say that the X-series are for ultralight, ultraportable uses, which gives good battery life but cuts out things like peripherals in a lot of them.
However, my work Lappy is a Dell 630, quite nice, dual-core
CPU, and with a reasonable on-board graphics chip (256MB dedicated
RAM) that can hack out Oblivion, HL2, BF2, COD4, and others. Not the highest res, of course, but quite good. Plus you can claim, "Dude, I got a Dell."
They're quite reliable. I just spec'd out a Vostro with maxed
CPU (2.4GHz, dual-core),
RAM (4GB), and graphics (8600GT to go, or something like that). Came to $1800+ after the instant rebates.
Point is, with 2 grand to kill, you can go a long way. If this is your first year at college, I'd go so far as just spending a grand on a Dell and save the extra grand for ... uh ... soda. And the like.
-godling