Graduation Gift Survey, Gettin a Laptop... Options

[red94celicagt]

Hey guys, this friday is my last day of high school forever!!

Anyways, I graduate on June 5th, and my mom is going to get me a laptop for my graduation gift. I am not sure which kind to get and was hoping some of you guys (and girls ) on here can help me pick one out.

I need a computer which can do:

word processing
gaming (such as Worlds of Warcraft, Diablo II, Starcraft)
CAD program
Wireless Internet
Download music (about 15-20 gigs on music)

Also, I assume I would need an 80GB HD, CD/RW Drive with DVD player capabilities, 512 MB RAM, and I would prefer a 3GB+ Processor Pentium 4 but if there is a different one, please share


My mom works at a college and therefore gets a nice deal from gateway when she purchases it through the school, so a nice gateway would be a plus since the price would be lower. I will also be going to UC (cincinnati) for college and I believe they have some sort of deal through Dell for their students, although this may be only on select (IE sh*tty) computers. I'm looking to spend about $1k...anyone have a laptop that they really like and have minimal problems with?

Thanks guys for your input!

This post has been edited by red94celicagt: May 23, 2005 - 12:42 PM

[mikew04]

I got a dell inspiron 1150 for my grad gift. I love it. It runs CAD, inventor autodesk, matlab and such just fine, plays counter-strike fairly well, has about 30 gigs of music on it, came with a wireless modem and windows xp. You can get one with whatever you want on it, and they have good customer service. I did have a problem with mine overheating, called them up, and they had the motherboard replaced and my computer back to me in 2 days. Whatever you do, get a replacement plan of some sort. You're probably going to need it sooner or later, especially when living in a dorm.

A question for ya, I read your other post, where are you goin to school at? UC?