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

[lagos]

1st of all... dont expect much gaming performance from a laptop. for everytihng else youll be just fine. i have a 2.8gigahtz HP as a internet computer for my mom and a desktop for my gaming, music production needs.

basically find out what your budget is and then get the fastest thing you can afford. try to pick out a model and then look it up on internet store sites. a lot of times they will have reviews and feedback on there that will tell you if there are any issues with the model you want. these days anything from dell, gateway or hp should work great tho.

[Andason]

1st of all... dont expect much gaming performance from a laptop.
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on a 1000 dollar budget dont expect much. i have a low line dell laptop (with minor upgrades) and it was right around 1000 after tax, shipping, etc. i even get a 15% discount.