I want to buy a 17" laptop.

I don't care that they are bulky and heavy.  I'm not ready to invest in a new desktop and I want a laptop with a reasonable amount of power.  Since you can't buy a decent laptop (read: game-worthy) with anything smaller than a 17" WUXGA, I'll work with that.

Now, what makes should I be looking at?  Dell has some very reasonable configurations in their Inspiron family combined with some nice coupons makes them hard to ignore.  I know that Alienware is now part of Dell.  Does that make thier laptops any better/worse?  I understand that they are overpriced.  I was looking at some Clevos, but I have some reservations ordering a barebones system from a shoddy website using a Yahoo store front.  Is this concern well-founded or can someone point me towards a good Clevo retailer?

Suggestions welcome.  Flames too, I guess.

Geez, my English is superb this evening.  Carry on.

If you're not bothered with the amount of heat generated, get the alienware aurora, otherwise Dell's inspiron 9400/ e1705 with the 7900gs and 2 gb of ram is a good combination and if you're worried about 64 bit, some people already tried putting conroe (core2)to their inspiron 9400 and it worked right off no need to get unofficial BIOS, etc etc.

Also, is nVivida handing ATi their ass in the mobile market or has the field evened out at all?  Spec-wise, ATi's offerings are more attractive, but I know that they are getting beaten to death by nVidia in the desktop market.

>>3

I like how the Auroras spec out, but unfortunately they are not offered with an Intel proc.  I know that the Core Duo knocks the shit out of the Turion, so unless Alienware starts offering the Turion X2 like tomorrow, I won't even think about buying an AMD notebook.

Opera sucks sure there's an ebuild for opera but it just get dropped to /opt, it's statically linked, and it's CLOSED SOURCE, which means that it is a BINARY packag

>>5
According to laptop review sites nVidia is a better offering, since ati's top end is a bit lacking in quantity, how many offers x1900 mobile.... not much compared to the geeforce 7 series offering, the top king of laptop vga is geeforce gfx 7900 gtx with 512mb of ram