I recently got a laptop as part of my 21st birthday. My actual birthday isn't until Christmas Day, but I got it early to help with my dissertation, which I now find invaluable. Anyway, here's a picture of it:

The specs are: Vista Premium, 160GB HDD, 2GB Ram, AMD Athlonx2 1.8Ghz and a ATi HD2600. This is for the very humble sum of £500. The first thing you notice when you open it up is that the keyboard is a bit squashed. MSI decided to put a full numeric keypad on the right, which leaves the "./" and right shift keys very small. Also the blu "Fn" button used to adjust brightness and volume is where the Ctrl button is, which for a laptop marketed for gaming isn't the brightest of ideas.

Slightly cramped keyboard aside (once you get used to it it's fine), the actual OP feels a bit forced. I had a lot of problems with Vista, where the taskbar would lock up and need restarting, and once the entire thing just decided it was no longer 1280x800 but 640x400 and turned everything purple. Gaming felt disappointing as Source based games like TF2 were choppy even with the graphics turned down to minimum.

I have since customised it with a 300GB hard drive and Windows XP. If you get this laptop I strongly recommend you do the same. Since doing so the laptop has had a new lease on life. Frame rates of all games played have jumped 10-20 frames and aside from having to manually transfer drivers onto it, I've had no problems whatsoever. I've even started to customise it with themes:

I'm going to install Crysis at a later date and give it a real run for it's money. For the price it asks for, it really is a great piece of kit.

I give it 8/10.