Well it’s time for me to buy a new laptop, since mine is officially a dinosaur. Anyways, I was looking around and noted that Sager offers some pretty high specs at low prices. What Alienware or Voodoo charges at the $6000+ level; Sager brand does the same at $3000. Anyone have any experience with a Sager, or a suggestion of an alternate brand.
Of course I could always just get a desktop… but I’m always on the move (US to Japan to US).
how insane of a spec do you want? for professional use or gaming use?
because for that money i personally would get a macbook pro 
Nothing too much: just at least quad core and dual 512 video cards. 
I’d personally go for this Toshiba model if your looking to spend 3k on a laptop. It runs on the Santa Rosa platform, has 2gb of ram (though has partial shared with video card), and uses a dedicated gaming card the 8700M GT. The only thing you might not like is that the native resolution is only 1440x900 which might not be good enough for some.
I’d avoid these processors for the time being:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/28/1124256
The prices for the quad cored drop in a week or so btw… http://www.buildyourown.org.uk/forums/topic.asp?topic_ID=25348 But I don’t think quad cores for laptops have been developed yet.
Don’t know about the laptop Core 2 Duo processsors though. If you live in the west coast Fry’s has a Sony Vaio for sale for $1999.99; the sale lasts until July 17. It comes equipped with a Core 2 Duo T7300, Blu Ray player, and 2 GB of RAM. I didn’t save the ad so I forgot what the other specs were, but the hard drive is at least 120 GB, I believe. And, if I recall, I believe the screen size ranges from 13.3" - 17.4"
Here is a place that always lists Dell coupon codes - http://www.notebookreview.com/dellCoupon.asp
Their high-end model, the XPS, usually doesn’t have coupon codes though.
The dell inspiron 1401 I bought recently is awesome and it served me well at Anime Expo. 14.1" screen w/ Glossy Display + Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.00GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 667 MHz FSB) + Intel Next Gen Wireless N card + 9-cell Primary Battery for 8 hours worth of operating life without AC adapter ftw. It cost me $1,267.23 and yes I overpaid for it by a bit less than $100. I didn’t get to use the best coupon code… And the hard drive is only 120GB and there’s no DVD burner (I probably wouldn’t use it). There’s also no graphics card (no Raidy review from me).
I did order an additional back up battery with it, however. It also came with some bluetooth thing that I won’t use; also, I opted to get the Audigy software and just the basic version of vista.
Dell JUST recently came out with the new Inspiron 1420 model. This model allows you to choose the color of your laptop, allows you the option to upgrade your processor to T7500 (better clock speed), add in a Bluray drive for $700, upgrade your screen to a higher resolution (1440 x 900), allow you to add up to 4 GB of RAM, allow you to add in a 160 GB HD at 7200 RPM for only $50 more, and best of all allow you to add in a graphics card (128MB NVIDIA® GeForce® Go 8400M GS) for only $100 more.
Grrr…I could’ve gotten this much better model with a better processor AND a graphics card for the same price if I had chosen to wait a month.
[ 07-14-2007, 06:04 AM: Message edited by: Mockingbird ]
Thanks for all the input. 
That Intel flaw I didn’t know about… now I’m going to wait a bit and see how the dust settles. Not really an AMD fan, but then I don’t want a processor that’s piss poor. And yet lower price can sometimes “justify” the risks.
Life is no fun without danger, ne?
Yeah, potentially-exploitable flaws on a processor are baaaaaad news.