TC, what you need to do is take a good, hard look at what your needs and expected uses really are. While gaming laptops have their place in the world, that place is a very small niche: they're expensive, they really are that heavy (in my experience, carting around anything bigger than an MBP 13 is an annoyance, and anything bigger than an MBP 15 quickly becomes a pain in the ass), their battery life really is that terrible (which adds to the weight problem since you have to carry around the power brick all the time), and on top of that in the event it doesn't die in 2-3 years (at which point it's a glorified paper weight, because the 2+ year old replacement parts are still so expensive and generally hard to install that you might as well just buy a new laptop) it'll likely be woefully obsolete.

On the other hand, for $1000-1500 you can get yourself a quality mATX/mini-ITX rig (Silverstone and Fractal Design have some really great cases, especially the Silverstone Sugo and FT03) and an E-350/450 netbook or a tablet like an Eee Pad Transformer or even an iPad (if you keep the desktop a little more budget oriented). You get yourself a significantly more powerful gaming rig that's fully upgradable and a portable solution that'll still let you play some quality games while getting more than 90 minutes of battery life. Sure you won't be able to whip out your laptop and play Skyrim every waking hour, but how many times are you actually going to be sitting down for a gaming session outside of your own home?

The one other thing you might want to consider is the Alienware M11x. It's a love-it/hate-it proposition of an ultraportable with real gaming chops/big, heavy, ugly and expensive netbook with slow-for-the-price hardware, but for most people it's a better option than a proper gaming laptop.

AMD doesn't seem very focused.

If you ask me they would be better off putting their eggs in one basket and trying to be the best at that. It seems to work pretty well for Intel and Nvidia.

whitey_rolls

They won't actually be making it, they'll just buy it from another OEM and have them slap on an AMD sticker.

NCIX has actually had this stuff on sale for a while (August, I think). I guess it's a marketing thing (since there's no way in hell AMD plans on making money on budget RAM) to help entice new builders who might otherwise be overwhelmed -- just buy the stuff with AMD stickers on it -- but it's odd that they'd start with something as simple as RAM and not something like a simplified line of mobos or Radeon-branded cases+PSUs.

Chances are your heatsink/fan is just clogged with dust. Pop the bottom panel off the laptop and give the heatsink/fan a good cleaning with compressed air. If that doesn't work you'll have to shell out for a laptop cooling stand (which might not be a bad idea anyway, gaming laptops in general have a nasty habit of cooking themselves sooner or later).

Could also be driver issues (some versions will naturally give you better performance than others, which in a laptop can be the difference between running hot and running too hot) or an old, crufty Windows install wasting resources (if you have a proper back-up, you can factory reset and be back up in running in a few hours).

Games are games not movies. If a game is striving to be some fake cinematics bs and it fails at it (all games fail at this but anyway) fine dock it marks. But if the point has and never will be story, why the hell should it be stated as a weakness? I find this practice in reviewing shameful and leading away from what a game is in its purest form.

ActicEdge

If the story isn't the point of the game, it begs the question of why was the story so awful that the reviewer felt the need to comment on it. You can't just forgive sh*tty, distracting writing because "oh, the story was never the point anyway" -- if the story wasn't the point, why would the developer go through the effort writing one capable of being an issue in the first place?

Good God no. Definitely trust the opinions of a bunch of anonymous users on the internet and your own concerns over your doctor's experience and years of training.

Except the number of iPhone games that sold that much can be counted on your hands. :? Average revenue for iOS games is very low. Epic (the makers of Infinity Blade) said the average iOS game only makes $300. You can't say the same for handheld games, where the average revenue is a $1,000,000+.

Eponique

But that speaks more to the nature of app stores (ie virtually no barrier to entry coupled with a still new, growing/evolving platform that has little curatorship) than it does "only Rovio, Pop Cap and Zynga are ever going to be able to make money off of smartphone/tablet gaming". Plus I don't think Nintendo or a major Sony studio would have to worry about only selling something like 300 units at $0.99.

Hopefully it will be more sucessful than the previous ones. I think only one or two of them still are in operating order there. I wonder how long it will be before they actually send a human to Mars? If it only takes 8 months or so... it seems like it could be possible now with our technology of today.

Sandpiper121PP

Spirit and Opportunity were supposed to be 90 day missions; Sprit lasted over 1900 days before becoming stuck in some soft soil (over 2600 if you count the time it still functioned as a "stationary research station") and Opportunity is still functional. I think they did alright. :P

JAGUAR:

If you have to ask, 2500k.

i wish i could punch amd in the face sometimes or at least kick them in the jewells. They wasted 4 years of time, hyped this garbage right up to the effing end even though they knew it was bad At the same time they made information on it so scarce to build up hype, but now that we can look back, it was probably due to it sucking so bad. In the end AMD incompetence just screws over the customer, since intel doesn't have to care about dropping their prices. Heck intel just released another $1000 cpu, thanks to AMD sucking that much

blaznwiipspman1

AMD has nothing to do with Intel selling a $1000 CPU -- the 3960X is a top-of-the-line pure-workstation CPU (it's a top-of-the-line SNB Xeon with two cores disabled), not a consumer part; it would be that price no matter what AMD did with Bulldozer (if anything you would have seen AMD's prices shoot up, just like the old Athlon 64 days when the FX-60 was going for $1000+).