Addiction to Gaming

I have settled on my future education, and I'm going to study Embedded Systems Engineering (a combination of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering), and I'm going to need a laptop any time between now and August 2012.
So I have 0 knowledge concerning laptops, so I figured I'd ask you guys for advice.
Here's the specs I need;

- Enough ram to run 2 or 3 expensive programs simultaneously. (Photoshop, etc.)
- Pretty High-Res Widescreen (16:9 or 16:10, around 1920x1080)
- Good graphics card (or well, good enough to run 3D applications at least.)
- Must run Windows 7 (no macs lol)
- Must not die within 4 years

Ideally, this laptop would cost under €1000 ($1400). My favourite colours are Orange and Black, so you can roll with that. I'm just wondering what kind of brands or laptop models you guys come up with. :3
thanks in advance.

Does it absolutely have to be a laptop? You'd be much better off with a desktop.

VAUXHALL wrote:Does it absolutely have to be a laptop? You'd be much better off with a desktop.

I have to haul it from home to school and back 5 days a week, and in the future possibly to my internship and/or job aswell. So yes.

best to wait till when you actually need it august is along ways away

I personally recommend using business class computers, none of the ones in big box stores like future shop and best buy (I don't know what the big box stores are in your country). In my experience, they are badly built and the hardware craps out after 1-2 years.

My friend (studied Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science), and I (Studied Biochemistry with Functional Genomics & Systems Biology, it's kinda like "computational biology") both bought business class computers from Dell called the Latitude Series. They are quite expensive, we spent about 1800$ for them and both of us are satisfied with them. Very reliable, lasts for more than 4 years and parts are always available if you need to fix it or upgrade it (although I wouldn't upgrade with Dell, again still very expensive). They are highly durable, I've dropped my old Latitude from Dell (D400) from the height of ~1.3m to the ground and it only dented the plastic edge, nothing wrong with the computer. The Latitude laptops come with a few options, like RAM, HD/SSD, graphics cards. You will have to check what you need for your classes and whatnot because business class computers don't come with TB HD (usually the max HD is 500GB) and they don't have like geForce cards either they use NVS ones from Nvidia (I don't know what makes a good graphics card so I wouldn't be able to advise on that) just avoid the Intel integrated ones.

There is also the Laptops from Lenovo or IBM, I've heard very good things about them, but I never owned one so I wouldn't be able to give my impressions about them. The only business class computers that I DO NOT recommend are the ones from HP. We have one in the lab I work in, it came with one of our science instruments and is terrible, it crashes and very sluggish. I was very dissapointed that they provided us with a crummy laptop when we spent 35 000$ on that instrument. Well it did come with Vista...

Anyways that is just my 2 cents on it. I'm sure others can also advise as well (maybe better solutions than mine)

Stephen wrote:best to wait till when you actually need it august is along ways away

probably, but I wanted to see what to keep my eyes on when I do decide to buy a laptop.

@Marcus; thanks for your input, those business class laptops sound pretty okay. I think 500GB will be more than sufficient, along with the other specs you mentioned. I'll look some up one day. :3