Hold old is your PSU? and what Make/Watt. I recently had to upgrade mine when I upgraded to a 4890.

Dodgy PSU could of blown it, swap the card over if pos but check the psu before you put another in.

"Im thinking about getting a alien for my birthday","i havent pc gamed in forever"

I would say you are between 9-13, lol "forever"

"ive only had heartache with pc gaming. Games not running, lag, awfull framerate etc."

If you havn't learnt anything new about building/using a PC then this will not change.

I would say save your parents money. You could buy a cheaper machine with a good graphics card and someone like yourself wouldn't notice a difference.

As soon as you go near something like GTA4 your laptop is going to cripple. 2 ghz is not enough, or at least it won't be in 1-2 years time dual or quad. If you spend $2000 on a laptop now you may be able to bet 30-35fps on crysis but in 12 months your going to need an upgrade.

Far better to buy yourself a $1000 laptop, or even a Tablet pc or whatever your fancy. And then spend the other $1000 on making a gaming machine. Only God knows why you would want to buy a laptop for games.

btw Gaming laptops tend to:
-Be very heavy
-Get very hot
-Have short battery life
-be completly useless without a host of addons- mouse/keyboard/headset all the basics.
-age very quickly- the 260m is nothing like the gtx 260, its more like a 9800gt. Almost impossible to update either because of lack of parts or just the cost

but yeah up to you. Ow lol not sure if this is just an old wives tale or something that actually happens but an ex of mine told me that the heat from laptops can make your **** shrink. Something to think about while you game :P

Section8- Not out yet but one to watch

Having UnrealED,SourceSDK, Sandbox1/2, FarCry2 Editor, XSI Mods tools,GMAX and Maya PLE- all free with games/download I can never find the time to play with this mod. I wasted $10 as far as I'm concerned.

Halo (the first) was something a bit special when it came out, the SP AI was like nothing else at the time and the MP had a good following.

Halo2 was not such a great hit for the PC. PC gamers clearly owned the console fan boys and they didn't like it. After a while microsoft basically cut PC users out of the equation.
Halo3, like most things when its been done twice before was an epic fail. It didn't even look much better than the PC version of Halo2. But then again what exclusives did the xbox have ?? :P

The only people that play Halo3 are people that:
a)Played the previous 2- not much to learn but a few maps.
b)People that only own a 360
b)People that have 'friends' playing it. Basically means anyone that is either a fan boy themselves, knows a fan boy or would like to become one.

Its like Zelda on the Nintendo. That game sucks so hard but ask any body on the WII forums about it.

Than again I'm a PC gamer and my tastes clearly arn't reflected in mainstream gaming so what do I knnow.

"And please, let's not try to dupe the poor soul into buying by saying "Oh it's not that bad" or "I never see any hackers"...you have Mario as your avatar, do you play "MarioKart" online anymore? No? OK then."

That makes no sense. Fail.

For £1600+ I would buy a £400 laptop that you can use for WOrk,Music and the internet and then invest £1000 into a proper gaming Machine, for that much money you could have anything you want. Even better spend £700-800 on a machine and build it urself. They use the £400-500 left over on a new monitor/ in a years time for upgrades.

Laptops are terrible for gaming. I did it with the first generation of XPS gaming machines. You will regret it and you will have to upgrade again in a year if you want to play anything half decent. DirectX 11 around the corner with the gt300. If you really want a laptop get a nice cheap one and leave the gaming to desktops.

Lol very true. I can't use a controller and I have no intention in ever learning. FPS's need a mouse!

Shame developers are lazy and would rather make a quick buck than push the technology to its limits. If developers tried as hard as the people at Intel/AMD/Nvidia then we would have some truely great titles.

Brian Lara - Good but dated
Brian Lara 2007- I never got into this one but its quite good, too easy to exploit the swing in bowling though
Ashes 2009 is due out soon another codemasters game.

There are a few Cricket Captain simulations about. Not really played them though.

Cricket2005 is my fav. yes its EA but it have the more realistic batting (based on back foot and front foot shots) out of all of them (including brian lara) and with the Community parches you can update the faces and player names to 2009.

Bout it though I think.