Laptop for College

[DaemonCollector]

Well, I just found out I got accepted into the CTI school at DePaul University, and gotta get myself a laptop. Im going to be in the Game Design program and they where sparse on details. What would you guys suggest? Something not too expensive, but dosn't need to be 'value'. Thanks for the help guys.

[paigeoliver]

Get the best graphics chipset you can find, otherwise the rest of it isn't REALLY going to matter all that much. Get one with real video ram too, not shared memory.

Mine is an emachines Athlon64 3400+ with 512 Ram and the Radeon 9600 (64 MB). Mine was an open box with some mild cosmetic damage and it was $1000 (same one new in box was $1449 at the time).

They change every month though. If you aren't going to leave until august then don't buy it until then, whatever you would spend today would buy an even better one in august.

[HaRuMaN]

Check on Preicewatch.com.  Also, I got my Toshiba Satellite laptop from clearanceclub.com for a GREAT deal.

[gprime]

Does it need to be able to play the games? If not ...

If you want the tinyest laptop ever, take a look at mine (ASUS s5n). At 2 and a half pounds, it's the greatest laptop for school... ever (Size comparison with my free iPod ) It's not the most powerful thing in the world (1.5GHz, 256MB ram, intel graphics) but for me, who just takes notes and compiles bits of C code all day, it's really all I need. Sometimes you forget if it's even in your back pack ;]

But if you need a laptop that can play harcore games, then I guess I can't help.

[ChadTower]

It's more likely than not that for the first year, you're not going to be doing much for real game development anyway, so don't sweat it.  You'll be taking social requirements and basic programming.

[itismejs]

visit fatwallet.com daily or put in a topic alert for "laptop" and "laptops" They will have the best deals...Usually they are dells.

[paigeoliver]

It's more likely than not that for the first year, you're not going to be doing much for real game development anyway, so don't sweat it.  You'll be taking social requirements and basic programming.

By the time you are REALLY ready to start programming games then you will need a new laptop anyway, the laptop video chipsets are at least 2 years behind the desktop ones, by your junior year you will be looking at a 5 year old video setup, which isn't going to cut it for gaming.