Laptop Advice. HP Pavilion or Dell Inspirion.

Ok I am in kind of a dilemma right now. Ok so I'm going into university and I need a new laptop, however whenever I customize a laptop from a company's website I start adding all these "powerful" specs to it that are pretty pointless, so I need your advice and helping me buy a laptop that's suitable for my lifestyle.

I'm going into university so I obviously want a good social life, as well I got to do school work, get involve in clubs, going to the gym, so I probably don't have that much time but still want to play the occasional game. With the main purpose of the laptop of taking notes in class.

I play Strategy games like Starcraft, C&C, Massive Online RPGs, (e.g. Guild Wars), Some online text based games, and FPS like Counter Strike.

There is probably a good chance that I will get a desktop computer some time in mid to late 2008. Since desktops will always reign superior with laptops such as you can upgrade with desktops while laptops have some restrictions (e.g the video card).Also you can probably get a very decent desktop around $1000 and will get a below average to average laptop for $1000.

So far I am stuck between buying an HP Pavilion and a Dell Inspirion.I asked in the off-topic discussion board andmany people chose HP over dell, so i would like to know which company is better to buy computers from.I want 2gbs a ram since I run a lot of applications at once, and I would like around 250gb of space, as well as good battery life maybe 5 hours.but you can probably arguethose points onto why I don't need that much.

These 2 laptops are the laptops I am seriously considering.

http://shopping.hp.ca/cStoreCA/BaseDetails.asp?PType=58&ProductLineId=25&FamilyId=111&BaseId=3710&BEId=5&Lang=EN

I get this student discount so it's around $1100 with free shipping and a free laptop bag.

The Specs below is the dell inspirion with no added accessories, well the wireless card I took the most expensive one from there and added a built in webcam

PROCESSORIntel® CoreTM 2 Duo T7100 (2MB cache/1.8GHz/800Mhz FSB), English

OPERATING SYSTEMGenuine Windows VistaTM Home Premium Edition, English

SYSTEM COLOURMidnight Blue Color with Microsatin Finish

LCD DISPLAYGlossy, high contrast, widescreen 17.0 inch display (1440 x 900)

INTEGRATED WEBCAMIntegrated 2.0M Pixel Webcam

MEMORY2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz, 2 Dimm

HARD DRIVE250G 5400RPM SATA HDD

GRAPHICS CARD256MB NVIDIA® GeForceTM 8600M GT

OPTICAL DRIVE8X CD/DVD Burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R write capability

I believe it's no shipping but the cost for this is $1669.

As you can see $500 extra to get this dell, but I maxed out specs such as video cards and crap. and this one I believe also comes with free shipping.

I just customized this on www.dell.ca, so if you can customize a better one that suits my life****that will be appreciated.

Money isn't an issue it's more about me being smart with my money then spending it on useless crap.

Thanks in Advance.

honestly, if you want a laptop worth every penny of your money, don't go with "major" namebrands like Dell or HP. They don't even manufacture their own laptops, it's all purchased from ODM's (Original Design Manufacturer's) like Compal, Quanta, a lot of other brands you've probably never even heard of. The fact is, just those two ODM's i mentioned produce more than half of the world's laptops. A good portion of them go to Dell, HP, Alienware, etc where it is rebranded and redesigned (but basically related to each other under the exterior) and sold for a higher price.

I was considering the Dell Inspiron 1520 when heard much more good things about the Sager NP2090 (a.k.a Compal IFL90) and I'm glad I went with the Sager. Overall, it was more powerful, much more durable, came with more features at a very competetive price. If your considering Sager (or other brands), I ordered mine from xoticpc.com. You can go with powernotebooks.com as well. Both have coveted service and support thats top notch and you will not be disappointed at all.

dell inspirion dude by alot!!!!!!! need any question message me and hp is good but if your going to be doing serios gaming ill go with the dell!Gridironn

ok thanks

I forget what kind of memory the graphics card in the HP has. Check it out.

Dell uses GDDR2 which is noticeably less effective than GDDR3, so if the HP's got GDDR3, go for it.