New Laptop

[Shadowe]

What would be the best laptop i could get for $850? i am goin to college soon and i would like a laptop that is able to run most recent games including FSX. the only problem is the only money i can spare is graduation money which i got 850 from. the best thing i could find is a

dell inspiron 6400 with

Intel

[Gunny04]

I dunno about that lappy, if you want to run games the best thing I can suggest is saving up more and buy a lappy with a DX10 card in it etc, Other than that it seems fine, XP or Vista, Hmm I don't think I can honestly answer that because I just started using Vista myself, Look around http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/Default.asp for a good lappy, for 850 I'm sure you can get something you want!

Gunny

[ctjoyce]

At less than $2K don't expect to be playing FSX at any respectable setting getting any respectable framerates.

Looking through every possible configuration I just can't seem to get to less than $940. What really puts you over is the need for 2GB of RAM. If you are running Vista, you need 500MB of system RAM just to run the background stuff (Aero, networking etc) then on top of that FSX needs about 900MB to run itself, so right there we are looking at 1.4GB roughly, then you must remember that you are stealing 128MB from your system RAM for whatever GPU is in the system.

So is an $850 laptop doable, and can you get something nice, yes.....but you're not playing FSX. FS9 could be had. It only requires about 750MB to run.

Cheers
Cameron

[Shadowe]

well i figure i can always upgrade ram once i get some more money to spend so ram is not what i am worried about really. would this be a good laptop as a basis if i can upgrade ram later?
another laptop i configured is almost the exact same but has intgrated graphics but 2 gigs of ram to start with. would this be worse than the first one or better?
also the second one is about $100 cheaper

[ctjoyce]

No go with your first config. You want the deadacated GPU, and a good C2D over RAM. Also as a tip, if you get something like a 100GB hdd, and then get a WD Passport 160GB drive ($100ish on eBay) you can take the drive out of the external and make it an internal for about $60 less than what dell would charge, and you have a spare drive.

An ultimate money saver would also be get an UBUNTU laptop from Dell, and then install XP yourself.

Cheers
Cameron