So one of my buddies asked me to find him a good gaming laptop for college. Money is basically not an issue (he can spend a little over $3000). The thing is, I am a desktop guy. I have built all of the desktop PCs that I have used over the years, yet I have no idea what to say to him when it comes to laptops.

Personally I said Alienware. But he says he is suspicious of Alienware. He says that he has heard of many that have had problems with the company.

So I am here to ask what would be the best brand to look at?

[QUOTE="drjoh"]

Yes, even though I have the latest drivers I went ahead and uninstalled them, rebooted into safemode, ran driver sweeper, and then reinstalled them. It did not fix the problem.

And the temps are fine.

darx55

The PSU is a 760 Watt. Is that not enough power? And which card are you referring to? The graphics card? I sure hope the GPU isnt faulty.

Yes, even though I have the latest drivers I went ahead and uninstalled them, rebooted into safemode, ran driver sweeper, and then reinstalled them. It did not fix the problem.

And the temps are fine.

First off, my specs:

Cpu: Intel Core 2 Duo E8600

GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 280

RAM: 3 gigs

MOBO: ASUS P5E DELUX

OS: Vista 32 bit

HD Space: 750 gigs total. About 300 gigs free. (2 SATA drives, a 250 and a 500)

Ok, a few days ago I started to notice wierd performance problems. Games that I could max easily before (Tomb Raider: Underworld, X3, Farcry 2, UT3, etc.) have started to have wierd stutters. They start out smooth but then start to stutter randomly, usually when I am pointed in a certain direction in the game. Whats wierd is turning down settings, even all the way, doesnt help. I can even turn settings up higher without it getting worse. (except for the average fps drop)

I had just bought X-Plane 9 and it runs like garbage on this rig. But it runs near flawless on a 1 1/2 year older rig.

I have run defrag, disk cleanup, and the following programs: ccleaner, adaware, avg, and spybot. Nothing has helped so far.

I just bought this rig a few months back and it has run everything beautifully until now. Hopefully I wont have to resort to formatting the drives.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Well that sucks. But I suppose chaos_bladez is right. I probally wont be playing my ps2 games much anymore.

Thanks for the quick replys.

I am using the Ntune temperature monitoring software and it guages my GPU at 66C idle and around 75ish under a load. My CPU guages at around 40C to 45C and my MOBO guages at around 60C. (it gets kinda hot in my house btw)

Unfortunately, the video card sits right on top of my sound card and it blocks half the GPU cooling fan. Nothing I can do about that. (unless I get another motherboard)

Electric fans are always blowing on my PC, and I clean out the case regularly. 

Are the temperatures getting too high and should I consider getting more case fans? (or should I move to Alaska? lol)

CPU and GPU: AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core 4600+, 8800 GTS 640 MB

Thanks. :)