Get'em while you can: HP makes really good gaming laptops. They are in the midst of splitting off from HP's tech services company. I hope this won't be a case of They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.

HP builds tanks for laptops. They last. Make sure you pick one with a discreet graphics chip. They usually don't come with a blu-ray player but it's an option. The two graphics are Nvidia or AMD.

edited 13th Oct '14 12:08:13 PM by TairaMai

I'm a bit wary of hp; my current laptop's one, and it deteriorated pretty quickly.

I should have said, my budget's £500-£800 (which is about $800-$1200); the aforementioned hp was £400-ish, so I don't want to cheap out this time.

I usually keep my laptop plugged in while I'm using it, so battery life isn't much of an issue.

Is there any particular GPU I should go for?

I am a Nvidia fangirl, Radeon tends to have more software problems but is cheaper.

I meant more along the lines of specific GPU models (and probably processors, but I've been told that the GPU is what you should watch out for).

edited 13th Oct '14 4:29:58 PM by Bisected8

If you can go a little above £800, allow me to suggest this one from Scan.

That's about the best you'll get here unless you want to go to a custom manufacturer.

If you can't spend that much extra, this other one may be just as good.

My keyboard is starting to give out on me.

The keys are sticking and it's just not working too well anymore. I'm on a pretty tight budget but I need something new, any recommendations?

This $12 keyboard.

HP's are tanks? Really? I had an HP laptop back in 2005 and it broke down after just over a year. Then again, I got that laptop from the Philippines and HP might have been a different company back then, so I dunno if it really holds true today.

Maybe your particular HP just sucks LOL. We have an HP laptop that's still intact. The only "issues" are the heavily marked touchpad, and the 250GB HDD died (got replaced with a 320GB Scorpio, albeit it now has Ubuntu rather than Vista).

Lenovo is in the news recently for releasing a dedicated "gaming laptop line". Asus and MSI makes great gaming laptops too.

x5: Looks good, but I don't think I've bought anything from Scan before. How good are they?

So it works apart from the bit that broke?

The HDD problem would happen regardless of the laptop being an HP or not.

Scan are pretty freaking reliable - and if something does fail, they'll willingly take the blame.

Hmm, how does this one compare to the one you linked (I was thinking of getting BL:TPS when I have a better computer anyway, so it's effectively £30 cheaper)? As far as I can tell, the card's slightly better and the screen's smaller (which doesn't bother me; I'm already using a 15.6" and I've got a 20" monitor I can hook it up to), but I might be missing something...

EDIT: Or this one.

edited 14th Oct '14 6:51:03 AM by Bisected8

The first laptop I mentioned is a little bit better than the ones you've posted, I think - the main thing that has is an i7 rather than an i5, which can be an advantage in some situations, but generally not in gaming.

In what way? 7970M and 860M cards seem to be more or less even...

Also, I looked on the Cyberpower website; it looks like they have the same laptop £20 cheaper (albeit without BL:PS), with a more powerful processor (although it looks like a more powerful GPU isn't an option on that model) and a SSD boot drive.

Mostly because it has an extra gigabyte of graphics memory - that can be a real boon in many situations.

Oh, I was looking at 7970M instead of 7970 comparisons. Derp.

any suggestions for a good, fast router for around $100 USD? Dual band preferably. My current one's from 07 and is starting to showing it's age. My brother and I share the connection for gaming.

edited 14th Oct '14 5:57:49 PM by joesolo

Do you need an ADSL one, a VDSL one or do you have a modem separate?

If y'all are doing gaming, I would personally scrounge up around $200, and look around for reviews.

But yeah, not sure on the terminology used, what exactly are y'all going to need?

@Bisected: The Cyberpower laptops looks like good choices. It's up to you though if you put much premium on SS Ds. They have alternatives that are much cheaper because they have only an HDD (and a 1TB at that).

@joe: I'm currently using a Linksys E900. You could probably easily get the E1500 with your budget. Although maybe there are newer Linksys models now...

@rather- We've got a modem separate.

@tc- I'd love to but It's a gift card we have sitting around and don't have much besides atm. if there was something close for a bit more I'd probably go for it but otherwise I'd like to stick around 100

And the prices for hard disks keep falling, store locally and avoid the hax0rs....

edited 15th Oct '14 4:40:10 AM by TairaMai

To be fair, it's much harder to share files with a friend directly from your local storage.

(Not impossible, mind you. At one point I even had a DynDNS [Dynamic DNS] account set up for convenient FTPing, but posting a link to a Dropbox account is much more convenient.)

Does anyone have any opinions on whether it's worth paying more (there seems to be up to £100 difference in places) to get a laptop in one of the manufacturer's custom chassis, or just a generic one (looking at laptops now, the appearance doesn't bother me much - that's what decals are for - but I'm worried about how sturdy the keyboard would be)?

Also; high performance HDD or SSD?

edited 15th Oct '14 4:07:16 PM by Bisected8