Edit: Bought New Laptop

I finally purchased my new laptop.

$1,150 plus taxes after $100 mail-in-rebate.

There are many things to consider when buying a new laptop.

First off, the processor. With a better processor, you can do multiple things at one time, you have noticeably better performance and therefore you can multitask with ease. The i5 and the i7 processors are essentially the best processors out on the public market so far. I highly recommend them.

Also look at the processor speed. I highly recommend anything that is at the very least 2.0 or up because any lower and it will affect your performance. The lower ones focus more on battery life.

School is a biggie. If you are thinking of taking the laptop to school, then battery life is essential for classes and i would consider the battery life as well. You wouldnt want the battery to crash in the middle of English do you? Get at least a 6 cell battery. These are good to last for at least 3-4 hours while viewing documents and 1 hour for gaming. Remember, the more cells a battery has, the better.

As for the video performance, you are absolutely right. Integrated graphics cards are horrible for gaming. Can i ask what games you wish to play on your new laptop? Whatever games you choose, one thing is for certain. STAY AWAY FROM INTEL GRAPHICS CARDS. They are almost always integrated and perform horribly with games. I say this from experience. The graphics cards i recommend are from ATI Radeon or Nvidia Geforce.

If you are lucky, you can find a very good laptop with a decent price. You can post any laptop you have in mind on this thread and i will have a look at it for you. Personally, i think Gateway laptops are good because they have very good graphics cards, good processors, and above average battery life. However, the choice is yours.

Hope this helped!

-Lethal

I would also go with the first one. And heres why.

The processor is very good. I dont have much knowledge on AMD processors but the very fact that it says quad core screams good.
The processor speed is also decent. A 2.0 GHz promises good performance and doesnt eat away too much battery life.
Hard drive is also very good. 640GB is A LOT of space. 5400 RPM is an above average speed.
The video card is very good as well. ATI Radeon HD 5650 is very good AND has 1 GB of dedicated memory.
I personally love HP Pavilion laptops. I just think they are great.
I dont like Acer.
DONT BUY A MACBOOK. They are a waste of money and require special Mac softwares as it doesnt use windows.
The price to performance ratio is very high. Good laptop. Good price.

Hope this helped!

To be honest I don't think it makes much of a difference at all which brand you go for. I owned an Acer and it endured two hard drive failures within a two year period. Realistically almost all of the parts that any company uses are outsourced, for instance the hard drives that failed in my laptop were Fujitsu brand (I think); the processor, RAM and graphics are all fairly standard among brands. Any problems you might encounter would have to be related to the power supply/battery, fans, or screen, and it would be unusual if anything else went wrong.

5400 rpm hard drives are still the norm for mainstream laptops. Up from there, the cost tends to increase exponentially in terms of relative benefit. As you say it can be difficult to get a battery that has more than 6 cells... depends what you're going to be using the laptop for as to whether that will be sufficient for you.

Even though I've had problems with Acer in the past however I wouldn't rule out buying from them again. They did manage to replace both hard drives which is a fair credit to them, and their prices to start with are very cheap compared to other brands.

You also have to think of the sales though as well. Dells and HPs used to be the top selling laptops, so it is also logical that they could be the most repaired in computer shops after their warranty runs out for that reason. I agree with Chief that it doesn't really matter which brand you go with, they all have their hardware failures. Go for a good price and make sure you make the warranty a factor in your decision.

I wouldn't go for the macbook. What you are primarily paying for is the look of it and how slim they have made it. You can get the same specs in other laptops for half the price as you have found. The only other reason to buy a macbook would be for the OS if you like it, but since you are going to be playing games on it, windows would be a better choice.

The latest one you posted looks quite good for specs, but the battery life seems a little poor. The estimate they list might be for when you have the main video card switched on, you could probably get more switching to integrated when on battery power but you should check that out.

Heres a suggestion. Since the HP laptop is around $200 cheaper maybe less, spend the extra money on a spare battery?

The ATI Radeon HD 5650 1GB Dedicated memory is not integrated. It has DEDICATED memory and is not shared. Also, look at this. I got this from your Newegg website.

"Pros: Quad-core processor is more than adequate. 4 gb ram is exactly what is needed for windows 7. the graphics card is fantastic for this low of a laptop cost... I can run Crysis at very high settings with a good frame rate. The graphics are awesome for a laptop. Very stylish and sleek. "

Everything is great about that laptop but you may want to be careful of the graphics chipset.

This website gives a very straightforward idea of what (by the looks of it) any mobile GPU would be capable of. If you do a quick find for "310M" you'll see it isn't one of the particularly higher ranking ones.

Looks like a very nice pick! I'm not sure price wise since I have no idea what that would be equivalent to over here, but that is a beast of a laptop. Hope you enjoy it.