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

[red94celicagt]

nice mike, maybe ill meet one of them =) any of em got hot cars?

[eyohannie]

Compaq R3000/R4000 series ~ $600-1000
AMD 64 3200 (2.0 ghz 1mb L2)
Dedicated video card (64-128 MB)
512 MB RAM
Firewire, USB 2.0, JBL Speakers
DVD/CD+RW [upgrade to DVD Burner]
60 GB 5400 RPM

The best deal for a college student, in my opinion. I have the r3000 and it's a lot faster than most of the Dells and Gateways here, albeit its a little heavy (~8 lbs). It typically comes with a 15.4 Brightview widescreen and is great for watching movies. Basically it's a lower end desktop replacement but it is pretty fast for under a grand. Also since they are almost all AMD64 they run cooler and have a longer battery life than the Pentium 4's (AMD64 is similar to Pentium M)