Dell XPS Laptop?

Originally Posted by rsek it's not only the GFX card that mathers..

Fair enough, but on an XPS you usually get a Dual Core 2.3GHz Pentium and 2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM

Originally Posted by Bryan Le Yes, but how are they worth the money? And if I get a top of the line PC laptop now, I doubt it'll be obsolete in two years.

Intel will announce a new chip in 2 months. Watch prices get slashed at the end of April on the dual cores.

You said you wanted to use it for gaming too right? There aren't many games you can play on Mac yet.

Originally Posted by chaka42 You said you wanted to use it for gaming too right? There aren't many games you can play on Mac yet.

You can boot XP or vista on a MBP... that being said, the performance may not be quite the same.

True you can boot windows on a mac, but there is no support and you lose some power as well...just get a windows machine if you want windows on it :P

You might want to have a look at some of Toshiba's laptops or the Sony Vaio lines. Toshiba have some very nice laptops and solidly built.

The great thing about getting a mbp and dual bootin it, you can use windows for the stuff mac cant do and then switch to mac for anything else. And if windows get a massvie virus you can just swap to os x

(Please note that My Father's company is aligned with Dell, and that I get a discount)

I personally own an Inspiron 6400 (E1505 in some regions) and I couldn't be happier. It is a little lower-end that what you are looking for, so I higher model in the series will probably suit you well for gaming. I can currently run iTunes, MSN, Firefox, and Flash FXP relatively lag free (Scrolling is a but slow in iTunes, but I think its due to Vista.) I think that as time passes and Vista becomes a little more accepted, it will move faster. As long as your using XP, I think you should be all right, but if you absolutely must have Vista (Not suggested for Gamin IMHO), I would consider getting a faster processor.

A while ago, (On XP) I was able to Run GTA:SA pretty well, however the touch pad and my lack of gamesaves has made me keep my gaming to the desktop.

I hope this helps.

Originally Posted by Bryan Le What would you suggest?

http://ibuypower.com

Since you cant really build a laptop, let these guys do it for you. You can customize all the hardware pretty freely, and you'll get a sick deal.

Whilst still on the topic of the XPS, i've gotta say something else.

Last week (due to my fault completely) the headphone jack on my laptop got damaged and the right channel audio was no longer working. As soon as i noticed it wasnt working i phoned dell and told them the problem, 24 hours later a Dell engineer had been to my house, replaced the motherboard and left for no cost.

I have experienced customer service with many computer manufacturer companies, and i can say without a shadow of a doubt that the service Dell provided was ten fold that of any other company i've been through