Need a good laptop

The only thing I can say is you won't find a laptop than can run Dolphin at a playable speed for $300. I think you'll have a bit of trouble finding something for that price range that can really do what you want. You'll need to at least spend around $500-$600.

 

It doesn't fit any of the criteria you listed, so I would say no. It weights 8lbs, has an old single core processor around the speed of a 1.4ghz Core2Duo, a small harddrive, slow ram, and a slow video card.

 

Have you seen This yet? If you give it an extra GB of ram and and a DVD drive, it should work a lot better than the Thinkpad. At $335 for the base unit, it's probably the closest you'll ever come to your asking price. Even with the extra ram and DVD drive, it's still over $200 cheaper than the Thinkpad.

 

What is is with Jewish Linux nerds and Thinkpads, seriously. My friend Riley payed like $2,000 to get one when he had no income and he's also a Jewish Linux nerd.

 

I'm not Jewish must be why I got an ideapad. :v: In all seriousness though Lenovo has good quality builds for their systems in my experience.

About the topic at hand though you're going to have to pay more for a laptop if you want to run Dolphin. If I recall it needs at least a dual core 2.0-2.5 GHz CPU and a dedicated video card. (aka not Intel GMA)

 

I know that you said at least. But I've yet to find a laptop anywhere near that for Dolphin to run smoothly. It could be worth posting some links as I'm sure some search engines restrict results depending where you live in the world. I know that there is something like that on ebay as you get totally different results by searching between ebay.com and ebay.co.uk

<a href="http://shop.ebay.co.uk/I.html?_nkw=i7-740QM+laptop&_trkparms=65%253A12%257C66%253A4%257C39%253A1%257C72%253A3133&rt=nc&_dmpt=UK_Computing_Laptops_EH&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_sop=2&_sc=1" target="_blank">Ebay.co.uk</a>
<a href="http://shop.ebay.com/I.html?_nkw=i7-740QM+laptop&_trkparms=65%253A12%257C66%253A2%257C39%253A1%257C72%253A4225&rt=nc&_dmpt=Laptops_Nov05&_sticky=1&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_sop=15&_sc=1" target="_blank">Ebay.com</a>

 

Oddly enough, I bought my HP dv6-3100 laptop for about AU$899 (minus $150 from giftcard, totalling $649) which came with Win7 Home premium, 500GB HDD, 4GB RAM, and an ATI HD5650 (switchable) dedicated GPU. Though yes, there aren't many laptops on this price range with ATI/nVidia dedicated, they certainly exist if you can find a store that sells such.

As far as performance go, while the CPU may be off-putting to some (AMD 1.6GHz mobile quad), it can certainly run 3D games at ease (in High Performance GPU mode). It manages to run PCSX2 but I haven't tested graphics-intensive games.

Best, purchase, ever. :D

 

I'd avoid the DV series... they love to die, and the cause is same as X360s - GPU overheat induced problems

 

In that case, make sure you get a really good cooling pad for that laptop.

 

No laptop should ever have to rely on any external cooling gadget. If a laptop overheats just by normal use. Then to me it's defective by design.