EMERGENCY, help me spend money- laptop..

I just bought my son a Compaq V4000T (customized) and I'm very pleased with it. I couldn't find anything comparable within $400 of it.

I have the HP ZD8080US 17" brite view screen with gloss surface, I find it does a fine job with photos. It runs a 3.4Ghz H/T Iridell processor 1024MB ram ATI X600 256VRAM and a 100GB HDD. It handles PSCS2 well. I find that the Pentium M chips dont have the gusto when you put them in a tight.

With my work I deal with alot of different computers; Notebooks, Desktops, all processors along with differnt configurations of components. I have had more success with the Pentium 4, or higher end AMD chipsets.

I bought a Sony A290 a year ago and I found when it was stressed it slowed down considerably, it came packaged with 1.7GHZ Pentium M 1024MB Ram. It was too slow to satisfy me so I sent it back and got the HP.

My main use for a notebook is Photoshop CS2, website creation, Flash, web surfing, and a game of Need For Speed ocasionally.

The best way to pick you a notebook is to take what your budget is and go to the web, look at the different models and pick a couple in your price range and do some investigation on them. Find bench mark reports, user histories.

Also there are a lot of forums that will give you the ups and downs on different systems. Here is one of my favorites http://www.notebookfor​ums.com/index.php?

I hope I have been of some help to you, good luck on your new Notebook.

Key factors in my decision process:

Screen - settled on a 15.4" at the best option available from Dell (W + some more alphabets + XGA)..... yeah, they tell you which is the best by having a higher price.

Memory - Got 1GB, does pretty ok, but 2GB is ideal.

Speed - got a 2GHZ Intel M, pretty good. Dont have a comparison with dual core though

Storage - Got a 80GB, but if you shoot RAW and lots of it, you will need a good backup storage device. Maybe you can look at a USB2.0 external storage which has become quite inexpensive these days.

Brand - dont think it matters. Sony has a good set of backers on this forum. I personally found Dell a better value for money.

Hope that helps.

Have a look at Toshiba. They have some nice stuff, got one last year.

Sager, no questions about it...

http://www.sagernotebo​ok.com/index.html

Having worked on machines for the last few years as a troubleshooter in tech support, I'd definately recommend getting Windows XP Pro over Home because of the tendencies that the Home edition has to "break." I've had it self-destruct even over such simple things as changing network settings (which I subsequently had to soft-reinstall Windows for...). I'd say that the extra price is definately worth the potential for headache prevention.