Is the HP Garden Dream 14.5" dv5-2129wm Laptop a good one to buy for my child who will be going to college?

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Kacie Harr

My daughter will be going to WVU for Pharmacy school in The Fall of 2012. I was just wondering if this would be a nice gift for her for her birthday this month? I would really appreciate it. thanks.

Answer
I just bought a Dell 15R for $499 off Dells website. It is an Intel Core I3 processor over the one in the Hp. Everything else is the same except for the hard drive size. Believe my hard drive is 350 gig. Plenty for me and I am a professional computer user and have lots on my hard drive. Case is plain and black but do you want to pay for that pretty looking useless case or do you want a better productive computer?

Can someone help me find a good gaming laptop between $1000 and $2000?

Eli Lawd

I am looking for something rather specific, so I will just list as much information as I can.

The first thing is that I don't want it to be blatantly designed as a computer meant specifically for gaming and no other purpose. There are several reasons for this, most of them stemming from it being a college computer. First, I don't think my parents would be very happy with me getting a "Samsung Series 7 Gamer," or something similarly named. Second, it has to be able to reasonably accommodate practical things such as word processing, video editing, multimedia, and programming applications as I intend to major in computer science and be doing a lot of things along those lines. Therefore I also donât want it to be very flashy like some gaming computers are, and have a lot of features strictly for gaming such as red-glowing WASD keys.

Obviously, a "gaming laptop" is a bit silly because everyone knows that if you want to game you need a desktop. That said, I don't plan on spending too much time gaming, because, like I said, I'm going to be in college. Also, I can't exactly take a desktop to my classes, or anywhere else I want to study. So yes, it has to be a gaming laptop.

I don't want to do any computer building or modifying- I don't plan on making my own from scratch, and I donât plan on modifying it after I buy it. So I need to have exactly what I want straight out of the box. I donât really know how to, and I donât have the time to teach myself how.

Now let's talk about more performance based things. I am not really too worried about battery life, because I just don't see why someone wouldn't buy a perfectly good computer just because it can't run without a plug for 6 hours on end.honestly, 2-3 hours is just fine for me.

In terms of how powerful it is, I would be perfectly happy to be able to run any AAA game released in 2012 on medium graphics with 40 FPS. However, I want something that is going to be able to last me for a good 4 years at the minimum.

More specifically, I want something along these lines:
Processor: Something at least on par with Intel i5, hopefully something nicer but again I donât want to pay $3500... quad core would be nice, but duo is fine, I donât know too much about the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge stuff so I canât comment. It doesnât have to be Intel, something equivalent will do, but I prefer Intel for my processors.

Memory: I would like a laptop with 16 GB RAM, but as long as it has at least GB itâs fine.

Hard Drive: Honestly I donât care too much about this. Do I need 2 TB of hard drive space? No, but it would be nice. My last desktop was I believe a Dell XPS 630 with 1 TB of space in 2007, and it lasted me 5 years and I donât think I used half of it. So 1-2 TB is fine, I donât need to go overboard though if it ups the price.

Video Memory: Not too picky here but at least 1000 MB RAM would be good

Graphics/Video Card: I donât think I can settle for anything less than a high end nVidia GeForce because letâs be honest itâs the gold standard for gaming at the moment.

Optical Drive: These seem to be a lot less common on new laptops nowadays, so if it has one, great, but if not, it wonât be a dealbreaker.

Fans: I know some people are picky about loud fans, but personally I could care less. Just as long as it doesnât burst into flames Iâm fine.

OS: I canât decide between W7 and W8. I have heard that W8 is not so good for gaming, but I have also heard that people who say that are just uninformed. And I know that W8 has many ups and downs but for the most part the good outweighs the bad. So I would like to hear some more opinions.

For price range, anything between $1000-$2000 is fine. I think something closest to about $1500 would be best, but if the perfect computer happens to be $1950 thatâs no big deal. On the other hand, just because something is only $1200 doesnât mean itâs bad.

One final note is that I would like it to be built within the past year, though I assume that's a given.

I have looked through a lot of PC review guides online and have not yet been able to find what I'm looking for, so I figured that someone on this site might be able to provide me with some assistance.

So can anyone help me out? Thanks!
Just for those who are "Windows 7 is so much better Windows 8 is just for tablets" I assume that you also know that future versions of DirectX will not include Windows 7 support... however I don't know how much of an issue that is.

Answer
1st choice I would say alienware http://www.alienware.com. also you can have one built to your specs http://www.dell.com or http://www.hp.com. try http://www.newegg.com

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