recommend me a laptop

Im looking to get a laptop with decent gaming capabilities and am looking at £500-650 to spend.
I have no idea about which laptops are any good, can you guys give me some tips. Id want at least a gf6 or hopefully a gf7 in the machine.

First question is why do you want a laptop?

Just to give you my general stance on laptops. If you want a laptop for portability and working offline then you only need one that's capable of running word, outlook, ie, etc.

Laptops are really no good for gaming, their battery life is appauling... etc etc.

The only way to make a laptop any good for gaming is to plug in a proper keyboard, screen, mouse, mains electricity etc etc... at this point having a laptop become utterly pointless.

well i want to do my blitz work in bed/upstairs and leave the main pc, my friend owns, free for others.

Many of us develop on a laptop (see that other thread).

It's good to run your game on a lower than average spec machine, and there are plenty of laptops with decent gfx cards these days anyway. For me, I love being able to work wherever I like.

Why you'd need to plug in a keyboard and screen to make a laptop useful, i've no idea.

Anyway, I'm looking for a new one myself. Thinking of going the Vaio route, but the Dell systems look good in terms of price, and you can pretty much choose whatever specs you like.

That's not what I said, I said "for gaming" as the initial question was wanting a laptop with "decent gaming capabilities".

If you think gaming on a tiny poor quailty keyboard with a mouse pad thingy, a 15" screen and tinny little speakers a quality gaming experience we're obviously living in different worlds.

Modern laptops have superb screens, and personally I'd choose a laptop keyboard over a standard one any day of the week. There are some laptops now with huge screens and a full keyboard including numeric keypad, so you don't necessarily have to choose one with an 'unusual' key layout.

My laptop is coming up to its 6th birthday and I'm quite happy using it for dev work. I'm also working on another non-programming project at the moment, and I use my laptop entirely for that.

I don't know what modern ones are like for gaming, though. Probably better than mine, which is a little ropey. Battery life is reasonable though - gives me about two hours of use on a full charge.

I think you need to take a new look at laptops, my friend..

many laptops have good keyboards... it's fairly common to get a 17" widescreen on it and a good graphics card.
get a good headset, and you can get a very good sound quality aswell.. :)

personally, I'd recommend Asus.. my last two laptops were Asus, and I've been very pleased with both.. :)

Stear clear of Acer Aspires, unless you're left handed. The blooming fan heats your hand up if you use a mouse on the right side.

I bought a laptop 2 months ago, toshiba p100, 17", bicore T5500, 1g ram, gf7600, full keyboard size, 160hd....
Well, let me tell you it came with vista, it was a nightmare with video games and programming...
After i install XP, i was amazed by the performance, it runs anything on very high quality, i am more than happy.
the other good point is, it s possible to plug a second screen, so i bought a 22" .. 17"+22", it 's just...wide :)

I got one of these just after Xmas- I can get one for £650 but I got it *extremely* cheap.

The machine is GREAT for what it does- but finding one at that price might mean going second hand- so test it.

I can play Test Drive Unlimited on it at 1100x768/x900 with AA on decently! :D

Good luck with that. I got a Dell recently (although for about twice as much as you're willing to spend). I wouldn't normally advocate Dell, but this one is actually pretty decent once you clear out all the shovelware it comes preinstalled with.

FWIW, HP seems to have some decent reputation behind them now. May be worth something to look into.

Buy the most robust Mac Book Pro you can afford, then setup Windows XP/OS X/Linux to boot 3 ways on it.

Avoid Vista like herpes.