Looking at laptops, suggestions?

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PessimistOwl

Senior Member
Jan 19, 2010
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So, I'm looking for a new laptop and I was wondering, since I'm a bit out of my league when looking for said laptops, what the Escapist would suggest.

When it comes to what I want, I'm not particularly picky. Basically, I'm a console gamer, but have fallen in love with minecraft. I would love, if I could get a PC that was not only able to play minecraft up to full specs, but was able to play it, and function really well with a mod such as GLSL shaders for minecraft. Not only would I like good enough graphics to be able to play this with said mod at really high settings, but I would also like the flexibility to add other things to the laptop itself, both in and out of minecraft.

Seeing as that's basically all I would really play game-wise on the laptop, I'm not looking particularly hard on a gaming laptop either (mainly because they have such terrible battery life). The reason battery life is a problem is because I'm about to go to college and I would like something portable that I can take notes on as well that would survive possibly up to four hours without needing charging of any sort.

As far as money, I'm not particularly minding cost right now. My parents are subsidizing the cost with five hundred dollars (the rest will be up to me) so I'm possibly looking at anything between five hundred dollars and a thousand five-hundred dollars (while I would still prefer not to quite get up that high in cost, I will go there if that is my only option).

Could somebody assist me and what I should really be looking for? Keep in mind, I am totally out of my league on this one, I'm a musician and not a technician so perhaps even a description of some of the main specs I would be looking at would also be very informative and I would really appreciate the description.

If you really don't feel like doing some extra research, could you just tell me what type of laptop you own and what you're able to do on it? Thanks in advance!
 

bobmus

Full Frontal Nerdity
May 25, 2010
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As someone in college right now I advise this - don't buy a laptop.
Buy a cheap netbook and a desktop. The netbook will serve you for the hour or two a day you're taking notes, but you'll be glad of a desktop the rest of the time.
 

PessimistOwl

Senior Member
Jan 19, 2010
275
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Could I come up with a way that I could buy both a netbook and a desktop for a comparable price to if I were to just get a laptop?
 

Dags90

New member
Oct 27, 2009
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PessimistOwl said:
Could I come up with a way that I could buy both a netbook and a desktop for a comparable price to if I were to just get a laptop?
If you build your own PC, yes. Netbooks are fairly cheap, they're about $300 or so. You can build a reasonable gaming PC for ~$800.

Netbooks are also extremely lightweight/small. You won't ever feel like taking a netbook with you is very inconvenient (and thus not bring it).
 

evilneko

Fall in line!
Jun 16, 2011
2,218
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Avoid anything that doesn't explicitly say it has an nvidia or ATI graphics card, because if it doesn't say then it has Intel crap, which is crap.

There ya go.
 

PessimistOwl

Senior Member
Jan 19, 2010
275
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I'll look into it. I have both an older Acer laptop and a Pentium 4 and neither of them really have the processing power required to play full minecraft (unfortunately I've already maxed them all out and everything) I appreciate the suggestion! What kind of netbooks would you suggest? Which one do you use?
 

bobmus

Full Frontal Nerdity
May 25, 2010
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PessimistOwl said:
I'll look into it. I have both an older Acer laptop and a Pentium 4 and neither of them really have the processing power required to play full minecraft (unfortunately I've already maxed them all out and everything) I appreciate the suggestion! What kind of netbooks would you suggest? Which one do you use?
I have an ASUS Eee Seashell series, and a cheap DELL desktop with a better graphics card put in.
Glad to see my suggestion could be useful!