What Laptop Should I Buy?
 

I know that there have been lots of these threads, but everyone's needs are different, so.... without further ado:

My birthday and Christmas are coming up soon. My parents are "talking" about getting my a laptop - however, it's on the basis that it's gotta be cheap, and I've got to use it for school. I want to use it as both a gaming computer and a school computer - and my efforts have turned up a few that are not cheap.

However - there's a laptop being sold at my local pawnshop, a Compaq Presario X6000. It's a little over $500, band I'm wondering if I should.

Get a Sony Vaio so you can be just like your hero DBS

Unless you're playing very old games, no "cheap" laptop will serve as your gaming computer.

What are your needs for school? If it's just typing, spreadsheets, and maybe a bit of graphics, a laptop will serve you well. If it's intensive graphics work, rendering, or anything like that, you'd probably be better served by a desktop; more bang for your buck.

What would school would require at the very most? Word and WiFi Capabilities. That's all I can think of. But those are the two most used things on my computer right now. As for gaming, I was looking to be able to play something like Bioshock comfortaby - meaning smooth framerates and high resolution.

Aside from that, I'm looking for something that's lower than $950.

yeah, no offense that is not happening. You'd need a high end machine and on a laptop it would be expensive. I'd recommend going for an Acer.

I'll be honest, you aren't going to find something lower than $950 that can play Bioshock comfortably. The fact is, even a desktop computer could hardly play Bioshock comfortably for $950.

To get Bioshock at comfortable frames (i.e. 30fps or more) on 1280x768 resolution (that of most laptops) at medium quality settings, you need at LEAST a Geforce 8600 GT or Radeon HD 2600 XT.

The Presario x6000 has integrated Radeon x600 graphics. Not bad for a laptop, but it won't even be able to run Bioshock at lowest settings. It only has Shader Model 2.0 support, and Bioshock REQUIRES SM3.0.

So you either have to broaden your budget, or forget playing Bioshock. As it is, its a decent laptop at the price, you just have to pay a hefty price for a laptop to be able to run any recent games.

Word and wifi are easily done, and can be done on basically any machine. Running Bioshock smoothly? That's another matter altogether.

Minimum specs:
Minimum System Requirements:

CPU: Pentium 4 2.4GHz Single Core processor
System RAM: 1GB
Video Card: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 128MB RAM (NVIDIA 6600 or better/ATI X1300 or better, excluding ATI X1550).
Sound Card: 100% direct X 9.0c compatible sound card
Hard disc space: 8GB free space

Recommended specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo processor
System RAM: 2GB
Video card: DX9: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512MB RAM (NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT or better) DX10: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or better.
Sound Card: Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ series (Optimized for use with Creative Labs EAX ADVANCED HD 4.0 or EAX ADVANCED HD 5.0 compatible sound cards)

You will have a very hard time finding the recommended specs in a laptop for less that $1000. I can't say how the minimum specs run, but I wouldn't relish the idea of playing it on a laptop with those specs.

EDITUS: Damn, ninja'd. ILS has summarized the situation extremely well. Playing recent games at good quality basically requires a desktop; a friend of mine has a 6-month old laptop with quite good specs, and he can't run CoD4 at anything resembling playable quality.

Actually, many times I've found gaming desktops for less than $1000. Whether they can play Bioshock, I'm not exactly sure. Also, I would suggest against buying a gaming laptop just because I hear it's much harder to upgrade when you want to play newer games that require higher specs....

A desktop is easily doable, are you set on a laptop?

I am set on a laptop, for a couple of reasons. I like the mobility of a laptop - I go to friends houses lots and wishing I had my computer there so we could game or something like that. I'm also moving soon, and I like the fact that I don't have to pack a laptop up, and I'll have a computer with internet access when I need it, instead of having it in a box somewhere.

It seems as if I'm going to have to settle on the Presario mentioned in the first post, as it's cheap - but I know nothing about it, it's previous owner or what the pawn shop has done to it, so I'm hoping to find a nice laptop that at the very least can run RaiRO, Word and is WiFi accessible that goes for roughly $600.