Laptop choices

Need something for once in a while usage on road to play WoW and surf. Like to keep it under 7 or 8 Hundred. Plan to up the memory to 2 or 4gb for sure and likely wipe it and put XP on it.

Main questions are on the video as most have Intel 900 or 950, Ati 200, and some NV 6100 and 6150s. Most use system memory. Most systems are single channel ddr2 also, so thats gonna be pretty crappy. But are all of these atleast around 6600gs or 9500pro performance ranges? Any one in particular much better or much worse than the others?

Some choices so far:

Everex StepNote SA2053T 12.1" Widescreen Notebook

Acer Aspire 3680-2682 14.1" Widescreen Notebook PC

Gateway Notebook with AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Mobile Technology TK-53

I can give some advice.

AVOID EVEREX LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.

/caps

I had a roomate that got one and it literally had screws falling out of the laptop.


EDIT: I'd vote for the gateway.

Thideras is right, (I would be said roomate)
The EVEREX Machine I bought (back when I was very uninformed about computer hardware) had 14 screws fall out of it (the computer was not used with excessive force or neglect) and eventually the port to the Power Supply died.

I owned it for less than 9 months, but the warranty sticker was a very poor quality sticker and it rubbed off from normal movement.

so stay away from their merchandise,
the gateway looks good too.

Well i realize dell is having some shipping delays lately for i would assume lack of parts. However i recently had one of their 20' monitors that had some dead pixels. I called up customer service around 3pm central time to get it replaced. The new monitor came the NEXT DAY. I also have purchased a dell laptop back in 2001 that i am still using. They make good products even if there are some haters, and for that kind of customer service alone i would buy from them again.

Thanks guys, yeah I will stay away from the Everex's then.

The gateway does look like it will do the job. I like the NV graphics so atleast should be easy to work with. And the 64 mb discrete memory I guess means is dedicated video memory? And you can up it to 256 by using system memory. Though I'm wondering how much cpu hit I am taking by going X2 instead of Core 2 Duo.

As for all the Intel cpus also. I am guessing the Centrino Duo's are dual core Celerys? And then you've got the older Core Duo's which I guess are the original Yonah's and then you've got the newer Core 2 Duo's are Mermon's?

The acer is really attractive for the price. I could easily get the extra ram, and even up it to a 7200 rpm HD which should push the performance up nicely. Think the 1.8 mobile celery has an upgradeable socket?

Whatever you get, make sure it has 2gb of ram. 2gb for a desktop is the norm now and laptops usually use more memory for battery saving features, etc.

Found someone selling this locally.

hp compaq nc6320 - $600

Specs for this model are pretty nice. Though I am not sure if the video is going to cover my needs. Price is pretty nice for the street price this model goes for I think.