How's this configuration look?

[Stavros]

Well, my brother is looking into getting a laptop. He wants to use it to run World of Warcraft. He is consulting me for hardware specifications. Problem is I'm not familiar with laptop processors.

Here's the current configuration:

CPU - Mobile AMD Athlon 64 3000+ CPU
Memory - 1024MB [512MB X2] DDR-400 PC-3200 [Notebook Memory]
Video Card - Mobility 128MB ATI Radeon 9700 PRO 256 - bit 3D Video
HDD - 60 GB 7200rpm ATA-100 Super Slim Notebook Hard Drive
CD-RW/DVD-RW Drive - x Dual Format DVD±R/±RW + 16x CD-R/RW Combo Drive [S-Series]
Soundcard Onboard
Network card - Build-in 10/100 Network LAN [Notebook]

Note: This was a configured laptop from www.ibuypower.com.

Any reccommendations as to laptop vendors please inform/

[Dinzy]

What is his price range? How portable does he want this thing to be?

The 9700 is rather old as far as mobile graphics go. It's 3 generations ago and since gaming seems to be a top priority I think you need to reconsider that.

I am currently looking at getting a laptop myself, but my priorities are nice screen, durability and portability so I am opting for a thinkpad z60m. This series of laptops is one of the newer pentium M rigs with nice video. Many other manufacturers have similar models that would give your bro decent gaming at a decent price. I also recommend getting the lowest ammount of RAm possible and buying more from someone else. Lenovo for example charges nearly 200 to go from 256mb to 1gig whereas I can keep the 256 stick and buy a 1GB stick elsewhere for less than 100!

I recommend that he consider battery life when buying a laptop. My last one was a behemoth desktop replacement, but I hardly used it due to it's lack of portability. Also consider screen resolution. Low resolution makes tasks such as web browsing really cumbersome since even the smallest pages require scrolling. Dell has upgrades from standard res to (w)sxga for like 70 bucks on some models and that option is really good. Just turn your res to something low like 1024*768 and imagine having to stay at that. 1200*800 isn't that much better, nor is 1440*900 which is what my old one runs at.

I am pretty sure that most people consider the pentium M/ coreDuo the best portable chips nowadays so look at those. Today it seems dual core are not worth the price hike, but he may want to get one anyway.

[ozzlo]

That's an artificial price hike... intel diden't hike up the prices very much for the new chips... the vendors did ;) my screen resolution on my laptop is at 1920x1200 and it's beautiful! With laptops it's sometimes better if you skip the middle man and buy direct from the manufacturers like dell. also another tip... if you buy cheap... you get cheap ;) I don't reccomend a sub $600 laptop for anybody... the quality level isn't the same.

oh and that AMD64 is a battery killer... pentium-m and the new dual core pentium-m's rule the laptop world hands down.