Looking for help selecting a laptop.

[Rasmus]

As the title says, I'm looking around for a new laptop. I've been searching for about a week now and I have to compliment the staff at Xotic for their site layout and customization choice.

Basically I'm looking for a very solid but not over the top computer. I'm a casual gamer, so graphics are a consideration. Another focus is hard drive size/speed and reliability, I have a lot of media files and don't really care for external storage. Here's a brief list of what I'm looking for.

15-17" display with glare reduction of some sort.
150gb+ hdd with 5400+ rpm.
I've had good experiences with AMD and not so good with Intel, so I'd probably want one of the AMD Turion 64 dual core processors.
The rest is fairly flexible. I want the usual (wireless, optical drive w/dvd burner, etc) naturally.

The thing I'm looking for most is reliability. I don't want a machine that will blow my face off with speed, but I do want something that can handle some large demands on it and will be an excellent performer for quite a while, and I want the option of being able to upgrade components down the road (no integrated video cards!). My budget is flexible, but I'd like to keep it around $1000-1300 if possible. I'd really love a few suggestions, since I know this is what you guys work at and excel in.

One last question: how much are the pre-made skins for the laptops? It'd be awesome to have a simple motif or a bit of art on the back panel.

Thanks in advance for your help

[Rasmus]

Another question: Can I opt to have no HDD shipped with the computer? I already made an investment in a nice HDD on my current laptop, I'd rather just use it and possibly upgrade later. If so, will that reduce the price any?

[mitcity22]

Take a look under "Bare Bones" and specifically the MSI-16332, it will give you pretty much what you want and let you configure the notebook w/ out a hard drive. It does have a glossy screen though which will cause glare if you use the notebook outside in the sun a lot.

It has a 7600go card so it will be able to play some games but it is not "upgradeable", very few notebooks are "upgradeable" in the graphics department, especially in your price range. (GPU's are moving into a new generation, current cards Nvidia cards are 8000's series. You may want to up you budget by $200-300, go with intel and get a notebook that isn't out dated.

I know you said you like AMD, but right now Intel is seriously kicking their butt on Price and Performance.

I would suggest getting an ASUS S96S.......it would be a much better choice in your price range IMHO.

[[email protected]]

As mitcity22 stated, please check out our barebones if you dont want to purchase all of the components. Please feel free to email me at [email protected] if I can help with anything

[Rasmus]

I bumped my budget up a bit and I'm looking at the Sager NP2090 Elite package. It has most of the things I'm looking for. It says that the supplies are limited though, can you tell me how limited Justin? Will it effect my purchase if I decide to go with that one?

[[email protected]]

The supplies are pretty limited. We are getting orders daily on this model. I would recommend placing your order as soon as you can so you can get your spot in line for this model. Your order would be able to ship very soon. Did you want to get the order in so you get your spot reserved in line?