help?

what is a good labtop to get for around 1300 thats good for gaming and whats a good pc game to get?

Unfortunately when you start talking about "good" gaming laptops you start talking about a couple of different price echelons and the first one starts at about $1500. Gateway has the most optimal price/performance system in the NX860XL. It has a base price of $1700 but every two months or so, they run a sale where they drop $200 bucks off the price. For $1500 you get a Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, 2 Gigs of System RAM, and a Discrete NVidia Go 7900GS graphic card with 256MB memory. At this point it'll run 90% of the games out there at a decent frame rate.

If you are determined to spend around $1300 then you might consider E-Bay - only be careful - probably 75% of their "high power gaming laptop" auctions are bogus.

Good game depends on what you like:

FPS - S.T.A.L.K.E.R., F.E.A.R., Halflife 2, Chronicles of Riddick
RTS - Warhammer 40K, Rise of Nations
RPG - Oblivion, Vampire: Bloodlines, Neverwinter Nights 2
Action/Adventure/RPG - Gun, Titan Quest, Dungeon Siege 2

For $1500 you get a Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, 2 Gigs of System RAM, and a Discrete NVidia Go 7900GS graphic card with 256MB memory. At this point it'll run 90% of the games out there at a decent frame rateTreadstone71

I do have a laptop with C2D T7200, 2GB RAM, GeForce 7900GS and instead of running 90% of games at a decent frame rate, it runs about 10%!!!!

Why? Peruse through this thread for example http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=30162

Don't get me wrong, I have Vista Ultimate 64-bit on my desktop, which works incredibly well with games (haven't had any issues, period). I'm no Vista hater, but be very aware if buying a new laptop for gaming.

Treadstone71, do you have a newer laptop that you are using for gaming? How does it work?

I'm running a Dell XPS M1710 - 2 Ghz Core Duo, 2 Gigs of RAM and 512MB Go 7900GTX. It will run all of the games out there with the possible exception of Supreme Commander although I don't own it so I couldn't say for sure. It cost me $3600.

I am avoiding Vista like the plague - I'm running XP SP2 and will not upgrade until a game comes out that I absolutely must have and it will only run on Vista. And let me tell you, Halo2 does not qualify... ;)

Indeed, if you buy a new laptop, make sure you have a copy of XP to blast onto it. I should have mentioned that in the original post....