Ok, I guess I'm finally going to pop the question to the wife...

Honey, can I get a laptop for work / my "I'm pretty sure it's going to happen" deployment to Iraq early next year?

Thing is, I've been around desktops for so long, I'm kinda hazy on the BBFTB standard when it comes to lappys... I guess the budget would top out around $1500 or so... Hopefully (?)

Following my own advice, I'll try to think of as much useful info as I can to help you guys and gals help me (hopefully), and I'll set a deadline for a consensus decision by, oh, let's say... this Friday?

Ethernet / Connectivity:

I doubt I'll get moved into a barracks room or tent that has ethernet jacks every 10-15 ft, but in the meantime, I can still hook it into my little home network and let it fold away for as long as I can...

Productivity:

No worries on bundled software, I have plenty of it that I can now get pretty much free at work, so maybe we can shave some dollars by not worrying about MSOffice'03, Norton, etc...

Entertainment:

A DVD burner drive would be a must-have, so that I could watch movies, of course, as well as burn the occasional Urban Assault soundtrack for those Mounted Combat Patrols through the middle of town (Nothing like Limp Bizkit's "Rollin' " when you're geared up and locked and loaded in a Up-Armored Hummer). A decent to good video card for playing more than just MS Solitaire... Company of Heroes, BF2, that sort of thing... Sound card, just enough to listen to on headphones, no need for an X-Fi Mobile(do they make those?)... A decent-sized screen would be good enough, no need for the Cinematic Widescreen in 1080i or anything like that... but definitely not credit-card-sized, either...

Memory / Storage:

I can always pick up more external hard drives, or temp store stuff on my Flash Drive if needed, but I'd like to have a relatively large-cap hard drive under the hood to start with...120-160GBs? Obviously, something on the order of 2GBs of DDR so I can BF2 on any R&R...

Durability:

Often overlooked by folks who just hop on and check their emails and whatnot, this baby needs to be tough. Tough enough to save me from an IED blast, maybe, but I know that would run the price up substantially. Something that should easily last through a 12-to-18-month tour, given the care standard that I normally take with all my electronic gadgets and toys...

I have started looking at Dells and other notebooks online, and so far, nothing really stands out from the crowd in all categories, at least not that I can see so far...

I would appreciate anyone with a helpful suggestion, or maybe even if you have a decent lappy for sale, we can work something out... Thanks in advance, y'all!

The 1st Annual Notebook Decathlon

Ten notebooks. Ten grueling rounds. One winner.

:: LAPTOP • The 1st Annual Notebook Decathlon ::

:: LAPTOP Magazine • Averatec 3360-EH1 ::

Averatec 3360-EH1

Best bargain thin-and-light gets better.

The 3360 features a slim but sturdy magnesium alloy case that looks and feels like it can take a fair amount of daily abuse. Up front you'll find a 3-in-1 memory card reader that accepts Secure Digital, MMC, and Memory Stick cards, making it easy to transfer pictures from your digital camera. On the right you'll find the system's three USB 2.0 ports lined up in a row. While we like that Averatec crammed so many ports into such a small chassis, you'll have a tough time plugging in multiple peripherals at once.

At work we all have HP/Compaq nc6120 laptops. The number of failed screen backlights, bad power adaptors and general lackluster performance has swayed me away from HP. Based on the build quality I would have to say - get a Thinkpad.

I would also consider investing in a spare battery.

My $0.02

For overall reliability I would say a Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad. I have had several and they are about as reliable as they come, but pricy.

Panasonic makes some called Toughbooks which are ruggedized, but like you said, that drives the price up.

I bought a Dell Inspirion E1705 and like it alot. I travel with it all over the place, though nothing like going into war, and it has stodd up well so far (about 4 months). The smaller version E1505 should fit into your price range.

Did you get it sorted GPN? If not, here's the result of 5 minutes of random thought on the subject...

1) Durable lappies are hard to come by. Anything under 17'' is going to be pretty soft, and even the 17'' ones aren't gonna survive much in the way of hard knocks - and they're generally a kilogram or two heavier than a 15'' model. Toughbooks are the way to go if you're going somewhere rough, but they're much more expensive, and I wouldn't count on being able to game on one due to the increased thermal restrictions of an armoured chassis.

2) Get a spare battery if you're on the road all the time.

3) Most lappies come with built in wireless these days, and if you can find a modern one without LAN, USB and a CD burner, I'll eat my hat. So you should be OK there.

4) Laptop hard drives are expensive. So you're looking at a fair bit extra for a 160gb hard drive, but in recent months the price of 120gb drives has come down a lot and they're now much more popular than they were 6 months ago. RAM is not cheap either, but if you're gonna be playing a lot of the games you mentioned, yeah, 2GB is kinda a good idea.

5) Regarding gaming, I would recommend at minimum a GeForce 6600 or Radeon X700 series card. These can play most games at medium to low settings and should fit nicely into your price bracket.

As far as recommendations go, I'd have a load of ideas if you were in the UK, but alas...

Check this out...

Newegg.com - ASUS F3Jm-AP012P Intel Core Duo 15.4" Wide XGA NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 - Retail

Asus are bombproof quality-wise in the laptop arena. That machine has a Core 2 Duo, 1GB of RAM and a GeForce 7600.

If you can't afford a toughbook, I'd just go for something like the above, because there really is very little difference between normal consumer laptops in terms of what amount of abuse they can take.

Anyways, hope that's of some help to ya if you haven't abandoned the idea.