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Well gents, as I begin prepping for my LONG trip to the Philippines very soon, I have the wife convinced to allow me to purchase a laptop so that I may enjoy my gaming in other parts of the world!

Question being, I have never really shopped or even looked at laptops. Most important feature is to be able to play the current offering of games on the market (as far as vid quality, req's and cpu speed). I am in the market around ~$2500 USD. Any ideas on not only make/model, pros/cons but also places with the best price offerings?

I'm not a laptop guy but, I'm betting you could get a pretty sweet one for that kind of cash...good luck!

Normally I avoid their desktops but I have been purchasing Dell Latitudes for my work (of course, my work pays but then again it comes out of MY budget for the section I run so it's very much treated like "my money") and I have stuck with them because they have been very robust and reliable systems. Generally speaking they can offer some video upgrades as well since they do come stock with the "Intel Graphics adapter" you already know so well.

Not that it's the best, I simply have experience with 3 in a row now over the years (upgrading every 3 years or so as new ones come along and I run out of HD space and need more CPU power since what I work with can be very data-intensive).

For example a Latitude D630 with a 2.40 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor and 14" LCD display (nice and readable), wireless network adapter and 80Gig HD, plus customizing with 2Gigs of RAM, an Nvidia 128MB graphics adapter AND (this is the good part) Windows XP (and NOT Vista!) will run ya about $1208 right now according to Dell's website.

Hard drives are the tough choice.....you don't seem to find the same 500GB monsters available in 2.5" laptop format, but it pays to get the biggest you can reasonable afford. It's $30 more for a 120GB drive, or $90 for a faster 120GB drive, but that's where the sweet spot ends since the 160GB drives are like $180 more.

If you look under "business" you're more likely to find Windows XP as an operating system choice since the consumer divisions want to push Vista....but rest assured Dell will sell you a "business" laptop.....

Anyway that's what's been working for me.

Good luck!

If you buy a Dell, try and get it before they install all their 'proprietary' software on it. Make sure they understand that all you want is the operating system, then anything else you want.
NOT all the AOL and other stuff they put on.

I formatted a Dell I bought years ago as soon as I got it;
There was something like 15Gb used on the disk.
XP was using 7Gb, the rest was all the crap Dell thought I needed (and absolutely did not).
Thing ran a lot better after that as well.

Make sure the graphics support hardware shaders etc.

My Toshiba has ATI X1400 512meg graphics with a 15.4" wide screen. It'll run Jops and FS9 without a problem, haven't tried FSX on it though.

Run this program as soon as you can. It will get rid of a lot of the BS software.PC Decrapifier

Only one thing to say Loudly!!!! NO VISTA!!!!!!! I recently-2 months ago purchased a laptop that has Vista on it and so far 4 restores and a complete reformat and it's still a B**ch to get some things working on it . I could go on but you get the idea I hope...lol. Good Luck and Have FUN!

ditto what Homey said.
Some people are able to run it fine (in fairness) but, from my own personal experience, I wish I'd never touched it.
endless problems with it.
incompatability issues with some older hard/software.
god only knows what bill was thinking when he put this pile together.
i have two programs which only run in windows, otherwise i'd be on linux now.