So fall term is lurking around again, and I'm finding myself in need of a new laptop. Since fall term is coming up soon and I'm going to be giving this one off to my girlfriend (Facebook, word processor, Skype, Photoshop- thankfully her demands aren't very heavy), I was planning on buying a new laptop around this weekend when I get my lovely, lovely paycheck. So anyways, I was looking at this HP laptop because it looked like a nice deal for the price (and aside from scorching my leg, I kind of like HP's for some reason).
Link
Nine times out of ten, I'm just drawing in Photoshop and listening to music. Still, my friends and I lan (slightly dated rts) games once in a while so I'm not really going to complain getting more than four frames a second on medium settings.

Comment sniping:
-The buttonless mouse pad does look incredibly irritating, but I always have my tablet with me for general mouse usage anyways.
-I'm not really concerned with the screen size, my lap doesn't really have the width for an additional number pad either.
-If there's something better out there that you guys know of, my budget isn't able to go past $900 (I'm aiming to pay for this all right at once, less hassle).

I'm asking you guys because (aside from the crazy amount of tech know-how this forum has for it's handful of active non-lurkers) for some odd reason, in all the varying circles of geekdom I'm float around, the only input I've been getting on my laptop dilemma was "Y'know you can build a better desktop computer cheaper". Thanks in advance!

HP Laptops are typically built to fail after a few years, especially the hinges. So are all the other brands, but I've both experienced and directly heard of such issues from employees.

That said, any "gaming" you want to do is going to be basically moot on an integrated card. Small laptops with non-namebrand cards basically cannot run games, partly because games don't recognize them as valid cards, and partly because they lack the horsepower.

HP is... well, my opinions are divided on it. It does make some laptops with very good setups, but, as Grif said, they do have a tendency to start showing problems after some time. (Not their netbooks, though, those are extremely good).

The one you have selected... it's quite a respectable machine, mind you. There are some things, though, such as that fingerprint scanner, that might just be adding to the price with little or no benefits. It has a dedicated graphics card, which is good, but an AMD processor, which is... not so good.

Hrm. All in all, it's a good computer, but you may find better stuff out there.

I have basically the same processor, except at 3.2 GHz. I don't really see the issue with it - as laptop processors go, it's actually pretty good.

Dude, just get an iPad, it's a tablet and it's the best tablet ever and it's even better than a laptop!



HP is, in my opinion , the best company to buy a "pre-built" computer from.
They have reasonable prices, good parts, and a nice design, all 3 of which Dell for example is starting to lack.

That laptop you picked out is perfectly capable of decent everyday use, but certainly won't be able to handle too much gaming.

My 2 cents:
Spend the extra $20 for the extra 0.4Ghz on your processor;
The 5470 is nice, but I'd switch to the 5650, not only for the RAM, but because it's a mobile card it'll be weaker than the full thing.
If you want to be all, "hey dude, my laptop has a touchscreen!" then by all means spend $150 for the touchscreen. That would be tight. I'd do it.
Lastly, get the 9-cell battery for $30. More power is always better.

I would be careful about HP. My mom got one for work, and the hinges broke after about two months.

I've been using HP Laptops for the past three or so years and they've only failed because I've gone done dropped them. That being said, I got my laptops from ebuyer.co.uk because the HP website is a piece of ♥♥♥♥ that refuses to process my order, keeping my money for up to a week before saying they can't process my order. Bastards.

I have had an awful experience with my power cable. The thing melted partially, and instead of having to buy just a new end, I had to buy an entire adapter. This might have had to due with the broken fan(my brother's HP has a noisy fan as well), which only got worse due to the hot summer heat of Hawaii.

Also, CC worked fine, as long as the temperature didn't get too high.

Just go for an acer, seriously. Laptops are made to break after a few years, even if you go for a toshiba, which is what I have and utterly hate.

It cost me about 850€ (1105$) two years ago and suffers from horrible interior design. The hard-drive always maintains a temperature of 50 degrees celsius in case I don't remove the plastic guard and has the cooling power of an electric tooth brush.

All things considered you'll get a bigger bang for the same price, just not the same trendiness.

I know you don't want advice for a desktop, but what you could do is get a cheap second hand laptop for school work (since really what are you going to be doing on the go besides checking email, word processing, and maybe a bit of photoshop) and get a beefier desktop.
On the one hand you'd have a decent on-the-go machine (especially if you load up some flavor of Linux on it) and on the other you'd have a longer-lasting upgradable slab you can call your own.

Just my two cents.

I've thought about the desktop option, but the biggest reason I've never really sunk my teeth into it was because I'm moving around too much in a day and I use my laptop sort of like a media editing Swiss army knife.

I was definitely going to throw in the extra few for the performance boosts, though the battery looked like an alright skip for the moment. If I can't find an outlet in four hours, I should've brought a book for that car trip. The touchscreen option made me chuckle, paying extra to get more smudges on the screen.

Added note: Twwig's idea of "gaming" is more of an "Oh wow, I didn't know I still had this" *nostalgia fit for a few hours*