Purchasing A Laptop For About $1400 Or Less

[modernrocko]

so, I'm planning on purchasing a laptop within the next few months, but before doing so I wanted to "shop around," so to speak, to see if anyone happened to know what systems to avoid, and what to look for.

I know a fair bit about desktops, but as far as laptops go, I know practically nothing useful at all. I would like to use the system for some gaming as well as regular CPU use for college (taking notes, standard stuff any ol' laptop could do). so I suppose one of the main things I'm worried about is whether or not what I purchase will be able to play games at a decent quality and with little lag.

of course, the thing that is most important to me is that the system is reliable and will last me several years, at least. I would really like to avoid paying upwards of $1500 for a laptop only to have it encounter lots of problems after two years or less of use. I've heard that laptop repair is very pricey, so yeah.

any suggestions on which parts I should avoid? any specific system specs, processors or graphics cards I should look for? the types of games I'm going to be playing are online first person shooters mostly, (counterstrike source, call of duty 2, along that line), and the occasional MMORPG (guild wars, perhaps world of warcraft or FFXI). it would be nice to have a system that could be somewhat upgrade-able, but if that would cost too much, I would gladly settle for something with system specs that would run most programs well for the next year or so.

mostly, the laptop is going to be used for studying and schoolwork and such, but I want to be able to use it for more than just that, so yeah. probably repeating myself here, but I just want to make sure I'm covering all the bases so that you tech guys have all the information

help! and thanks in advance!

[Honda_Boy]

I tend not to like HP, Compaq (despite having a Compaq tower in my room), Dell, adn gateway. I prefer the lesser known brands to non computer nerd people, such as Alienware, Falcon North West, VooDoo, ABS, etc. For $1400, Alienware and ABS are your best bet since Falcon and VooDoo and pretty much high end only, while Alienware and ABS have more mainstream and midrange stuff. A $1400 laptop isn't gonna be the greatest gaming laptop so beware. If it were a desktop you'd have one heck of a gaming rig for $1400.