I'm sure that most of you here on DevArt have gone shopping for a computer or laptop. You might not be here otherwise, right?
Maybe you had an idea of what to look for, a basic idea of "something that does this and has this capability." I went in pretty much clueless. Sure, I talked to my computer literate friends, but most of what they knew applied to desktops, which, as I found out, is a different matter almost entirely. Still, I wrote down the basics and brought another friend with me.

So the first thing we determine is that I WON'T be buying anything just yet, we're going to look around. This is eminently reasonable. Okay. We start out at Best Buy. Now the fun starts.

Have you ever been subjected to a sales spiel, but only told what you pin down with some very precise and repeated questions?

It's interesting.

I bought a game recently, the Prince of Persia, all three games of the series, actually. I'm excited, so I go home and try it out on my desktop, but it has neither enough memory, nor a graphics card that can handle the game. Ok, so I lose the excitement, but I was planning on buying a laptop and it shouldn't be so hard to find a new one that can play a new game, right? Well, no.

Back to Best Buy. We ask about a laptop that would be good for playing games and going on the net. They ask, "What kind of game?"

So we tell them, "Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed, that kind of game."

They take us over to the two most expensive laptops there. We look, but we're not that intereste in spending about $2000 for one laptop. Their response after some more back and forth: "If you don't get a laptop with a separate graphics card and a fast processor to haul the weight of those 3-D graphics and the video, the game will play not well, or not at all."

Ok. We say thanks and leave for Sears, but one glance through their catalog shows laptops far inferior to those at Best Buy, and far more expensive. Useless. We leave. A chance thought takes us to Software, ETC. a gaming store. We think that gamers will probably know what kind of laptop is needed to play their games. They tell us to forget any laptop that doesn't have a separate video or graphics card, and that integrated graphics cards or ATIs, are just a chunk of ram trying to do the job of a card. The game likely won't run without it. Not happy at this point, as those kinds of computers run up to $3000 or more.

On the other hand, the people at Software, ETC. recommend going to Computers PLUS. They're nearby, so off we go on our fact-finding mission, a bit wiser--so we think--about laptops. On the way we stop by Office Depot for comparisons and learn a little more, but mostly that their computers are on par with Best Buy's laptops.
The guys at Computers PLUS tell us that we can play our games as long as we have an Intl Core 2 Duo processor, instead of the dual core, and that the faster processor should pick up any slack from the not quite right graphics card. Just don't crank the game specs to max.

We're happy with that, we just want the game to play at this point. We go back to Best Buy and look around until we find something that seems about right, then decide to come back on Friday.

So we did.

Between times we have added the knowledge that we need good giga hertz to go with the processor, or even that won't be enough. We find that the laptop I had been considering wasn't good enough. That's a bit discouraging, but the we run into a great salesperson. Better than the last one. Instead of trying to sell us a pricey computer, he actually listens to what we wanted, checked the specs of both game and laptop, and showed us a laptop that could not only play the game, but play it well with room left over and at a much better price than anything else we've been looking at that is comparable.

I bought an ASUS.

As far as I'm concerned, I learned a lot from this and ended up with a laptop that was much better than what I'd been looking for and for a better price than I had ever expected.
To those out there looking for a laptop, I highly recommend the ASUS, and its Core 2 Duo Processor, as well as all of its other features. And if anyone out there like me has doubts about the new Vista operating system, worry no more. It's fantastic. It's already save my laptop from unwanted downloads that I didn't initialize. If you get it and find yourself getting impatient with the warning/alert that shows up when you download or change something in your computer, just think of what would happen if your laptop or computer downloaded something you didn't want without asking you if you had been the one to start the download or not. Can I say VIRUS? lol.

So, all I can say is, hurray for ASUS laptops.