Advice for a College Gamer

[Sicarius_Noctis]

Here is my situation.

I'm going to go be going to college next year and I really don't want to lug my desktop all the way to school (its a good 5 hour trip), but on the other hand I don't want to give up my video gaming.

If my grandmothe comes through I should have about $1400 to buy a laptop with.

I'm looking for something that has a decent sized screen (I'll probably end up watching movies too), decent battery life (that 5 hour trip back and forth is gonna be killer), pretty good ram ( hopefully at least a gig), preferably upgradeable, decent harddrive space, and a pretty good processor and video card.

I'm not worried to much about size or weight.

There are just so many different notebooks out there I wouldn't even know where to start looking.

Any suggestions? or atleast a point to the right path.

[glc]

You probably want a Pentium-M or Core Solo/Duo based Centrino laptop for max battery life. There should be some out there in your price range with a gig of ram and a discrete video adapter solution. Raw processor speed is not what you really need - ram and video is more important for gaming. BEFORE you buy one, you need to see if your school requires a specific model or type of laptop, and whether it requires XP Professional for connecting to the network.

[thefultonhow]

See how this looks:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834115225

The Mobility Radeon X1400 card is roughly equivalent to a Radeon X700.

[GuitarHero]

Desktops are really the way to go for gaming, its not THAT much more space, unless you really need the mobility.