help me pick a laptop

not sure about where to post this really

I've been looking at the dell inspiron 8500 and the 5150. the 5150 seems to be cheaper and have better options on everything, except it doesn't have the wide aspect screen. I don't really even care about that anyways. The only thing about the 5150 is it has a blue back to it. Either way, they're both pretty stupid looking. I don't really see any other laptops that are going to give me 512mb, a decent processor, and my choice of graphics card. Most toshibas and sony's that are in my price range (1500-2000) come with crap vid cards.

I don't know about this pentium 4 Mobile either. Right now I'm playing with my friends 8500 and on max performance setting the 2.0ghz processor is still only running at 1.2. What determines when the speed bumps on these? The whole thing seems shady to me.

any ideas?

are you looking to game with it or what? I've also been looking at the Dell's and they seem like a good bang for your buck. Personally I'd rather get a clevo barebone from ebay and put my own components in it. You can always paint the case too. Krylon makes paint that works awesome on plastic now...

Keep in mind that the 5150 uses a non mobile processor, so it will get garbage for battery life, although I don't like the widescreen either.

Wrt memory upgrades, Dell is notorious for price gouging on memory, so you'd probably be better off upgrading the memory from crucial or newegg or someone.

On my 600m, to get the CPU to run at full speed, I have to set the power management to "Always On." Just play with the power settings. On my 1.6 Ghz, I get the following:

Always On = 1.6 Ghz
Laptop = 800 Mhz
Max Battery = 600 Mhz

Just went with a 8500

2.5
512
geforce4 4200 go
40gb
WUXGA screen
mini pci 802.11 b/g card

I think that's about it. The 5150 comes with a bigger battery than the 8500, and it supposedly lasts longer. I'm not sure about the processor though, it doesn't say PIV-M, but it does say mobile. Dell's exact text is "Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 3.06GHz"

I wanted the better graphics card, it's lighter, and it doesn't have the stupid blue back to it.

The only problem I'm going to have with it is running games on a widescreen resolution is going to stretch them or they're going to have to run in a windowed mode.

edit: as far as gaming goes, I'll be playing games on it, but it's not the only reason I'm buying it. This should be more than enough to play any games for me. Didn't really feel like hastling with barebones systems right now.

I have the inspiron listed below and it plays games just fine...I play freelancer warcraft 3 half-life(i know, not taxing) and return to castle wolf on this laptop. The graphic quality is good and I play at 1024x768...the sxga screen is nice at 1400x1050
I have 32mb Radeon 7500 mobile which surprised me in terms of gaming, it does better than my old Radeon VIVO 64mb card back in theday, of course I'm sure the P4 helps out too.

edit: just a sidenote i only paid $1450 for mine, but thats with military discounts and a $150 mail in rebate