Labtop help. Building one.

[MiniKiller]

Alright I'm buidling a labtop (from alienware) or getting one from another company. What type of labtop is best? I really like alienware because that is the desktop brand I bought and I havent had any thing wrong with it cept a reformat issue that was my fault.

My question is...I can spend about 1800 (give or take) on a labtop, what should I upgrade and what do I not need to touch? Like if I were to build one on alienware.com.

I def want the best sound card and good graphics card the rest Im clueless about. This labtop will be used for pretty much everything. Alot of music and school mostly. Prob put on a few games to keep me busy to.

thanks!

[Papewaio]

Laptop's as a rule of thumb are about twice as expensive as PC's and have limited capacity for upgrading.

So you have to think what is the primary reason you need a laptop. And where possible divert the cash from a laptop to the PC where you will get twice the mileage.

Also if it is mobility you need... are you using the laptop while traveling or could you just use a memory stick to move your data around to PCs?

[MiniKiller]

Well I have this pc here which when it was bought was a monster (duno how well it holds up now lol) but the labtop I would use mostly for school like I said before.

I'd also prob have alot of music on it due to the fact school work on it would stress me out haha.

[Papewaio]

When you mean school do you mean...

Highschool, College etc.

Writing notes (notepad would do)
Writing assignments (word)

Or Aeronautical Engineering at university and doing vector analysis and massive number crunching?

[doc_bean]

y and doing vector analysis and massive number crunching?

Try not to do those things on a laptop, intense math programs are real processor killers in my experience.

Awaiting further details I'd say make sure you have decent cooling, and put enough ram in it.

[MiniKiller]

I'm a college student. It would be for basic college stuff, alot of research, alot of papers, prob from streamin video fro some classes. presentation setups and as said before alot of music to relax from all the work lol and perhaps a game or two.

[Papewaio]

Well look at the thing that requires the highest specs... the games. These will determine what you desire for a laptop.

As for what you need... they are determined by your uni course and as such the specs are far lower.

As for music... this should be fine with most on board sound... if you think you need better it might be cheaper and more portable just to get a dedicated device for music.

For any real crunching you will either use a high end workstation with server scale chips or actual mainframe time.