New to laptops, need some help...

Ok now i am not a computer idiot, but i am when it comes to laptops and what to look for.

I wanna keep it under $600 if possible... Here is what i mainly use it for in order of importance... I don't care about battery life since it'll probably never leave my apartment.

1) Internet
2) Very mild gaming
3) Microsoft Office


I was looking at Dell's and there stuff under $600 all has mobile Celerons. Would that be enough for some mild gaming? Like HL2, Newer EA sports games?

Is there another place i should look? Like some good retailers or other sites? Thanks for any imput i get.

try to stay away from celeron, period. --- but if u can afford 100 more dollars, get an inspiron 5100, these are great - big screen, p4 chip wireless --- meets your demands and can sub in for your performance system if the time arises.

ok thanks for the advice. Also is Dell the best out there for deals on laptops? I haven't really found any decent ones lower then them.

Celeron-M processors are still very good laptop chips. They lack some of the power saving capabilities of the Pentium-M and have only half the cache, but they preform very well. The Celeron-M based on the dothan has 1MB of cache and preforms exactly the same as the Pentium-M banias at the same speed.

Your best bet for a cheap gaming laptop is to wait for a 750$ off 1499$ and then use a dpa coupon + fatcash + dpa 2% discount to get the laptop ~650$. You could get a pentium-m system with a 128meg x300 video card, which will play HL2 just fine.