New computer for college, looking at compatibility...

[Peter.Cort]

i have a 15 and its glorious. haha. are you going to be bringing a desktop to college with you? if so i would get a big monitor unless you have one already, and just get a nice portable laptop that you can do some light-moderate gaming on and has great battery life.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

I looked at a dv9700 at Sams Club with the 17" screen, it looks exactly what I want. I honestly don't care about the size/weight of the PC...I am used to carrying around a bunch of heavy stuff (backpack always full of the past 6 months worth of papers that I never bother to clean out after we're done covering that topic in school). I want a laptop that will have good gaming performance (8600GS seems to be that, with DX10) and be as fast as a fairly good desktop. I'm going to bring my Athlon and Sempron desktops, but those aren't very good gaming PC's. I do plan on getting an LCD monitor with my laptop as well, but mainly for my desktops and my XBOX 360.

 

[krazyq]

i would wait on some hp deals to come up as i mentioned.
my bro in law got a
17" 2.2ghz c2d
2gb ram
8600gt
wireless n
dvd burner with hd
9 cell battery(i think)
250gb hdd
only for $900 after using $400off coupon.

Imaging all the other stuff you could have added since your budget is like 2k.

 

[fred333]

I would definitely look around for some deals.

 

[JoshSB]

I have a 17" Laptop HP, I carry it around in my Swissgear backpack and to tell you the truth I don't notice the extra 2 lbs from the laptop when compared to a 15.4" laptop.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

I ordered a laptop backpack from HP, I figure I'll be fine. I like big screens and my current laptop's really heavy, I don't think I'll notice it at all

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

Gah...just got my 20" flat panel that I got with my laptop...and it had a dead pixel, now I gotta wait for a replacement

 

[KSoD]

To answer the first question about the games and that. Yes the GFX card will work with DX10 and Vista. But Half Life 2 is not a DX10 game. So that wont matter.

You will have to install the DX9 runtimes to get that working properly in Vista.

Microsoft DirectX Downloads

Check that page for the most current download. Other than that the games should run fine. Most of the compatibility issue should be resolved with Vista. If not stop by my Windows section. I will hook you up with some apps that do work with Vista.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

I finally got the PC. It's amazing! It's nice and big, yet it's actually lighter than my ThinkPad A21p (15.4"). The T9300 is really fast, ran through some benchmarks pretty well. As for games, I've installed some older games and Half Life 2: Deathmatch (got it free for having nVidia). They all run very well, even at high resolutions. The only thing it doesn't do very well is Crysis (installed the demo just to see how fast I could run it), but then, what computer does run Crysis at full settings...

I'm also starting to think that maybe Vista isn't as bad as I thought it was, appears they made some big changes in SP1, because software that wouldn't install or had problems on my parents' Dell (got it right after Vista came out) installed fine on my dv9700t with 64 bit Vista Ultimate.

 

[Peter.Cort]

glad to hear everything went as you expected