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Those are all extremely solid reasons. I tend to come across as rather snarky and dismissive, but I certainly don’t mean to imply any condescension or similar. To each his own, right?

Re: noise. It’s been my experience that a desktop machine is generally quieter – a larger fan is almost always a slower fan, and thus generates less noise. Laptops, particularly large and fast ones, usually have a couple in-line exhaust fans – and they tend to ramp up to near jet engine levels at peak operation. The same is true of any newer video card, though, so I think it wouldn’t be any different, really. Is there actually a noticable difference?

Re: mobility. I have a laptop of my own for general use and I do the same with it: take it wherever the nicest spot of the hour is. It’s easy enough to do some web browsing or even fairly intensive word processing, image design, coding, what have you more or less anywhere, don’t see it being much of an advantage with gaming, since one is limited to finding a good, stable surface (with good heat flow!) and room for a mouse (or trackball, as you say you use). I find a nice desk with everything carefully arranged – keyboard-to-screen distance being rather a key point of ergonomics – to be much more comfortable for anything intensive. And besides, while it’s not a completely trivial task, I can swap my PC to the den for wiring into the home theatre in about three minutes tops. By the time you get to a ten pound laptop with a 17 inch screen, you’re not really looking at something that’s that much easier to move around.

Re: keyboards. That one really is to taste. Some people like the minimum of key height and pressure required, and some people will swear by the IMB model M until the day they die. I use a logitech G17, myself. The macros are phenomenally useful – almost enough to warrant the overly-large frame and useless extras.

Re: almost everything in one place. It’s another appealing point, but the gigantic drawback – which I don’t think you mentioned – is the impossibility of partial replacement. User serviceability – hell, mere user accessibility – is extraordinarily important to me. Most laptop warranties are void if you so much as look at the screws on the bottom – nevermind the fact that all you ever wanted was simply to clean out the fans and air intakes… If one single component starts causing trouble then an all-in-one design starts to look like a regrettable thing, when it means that replacements must be done wholesale, or at least off-site.

Re: hardware. True – lazy ass rule of thumb says portable tech runs a generation or so behind. Absolute top-end consumer components being what they are (and what they are is a colossal nightmare of cost/performance coupled with dare I say freudian undertones), that’s not actually very important. Plus, any multi-platform release is also usable on console-level hardware, which is by this point ancient.

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I can’t help it. There are four reasons I cannot ever escape the laptop (and this is why I’m glad that gaming laptops do exist):

- Noise. Desktops are just too noisy for me, and I’m frankly terrified at the prospect of putting together a water-cooled system. I find that laptops are always the quietest computer. My hearing is amazing, the sort children have where one can detect a CRT monitor fault just by listening to the frequency of its electrical buzz after having been on for a few hours. So noise matters to me, specifically: the reduction of.

- Mobility: I like to move around a lot. Sometimes I’ll even setup outside, sometimes I’ll be at different locations throughout the house, sometimes it’s a holiday, what have you. I can keep a laptop at my side and I feel comfortable with the presence of such technology, I wouldn’t be able to do so with a desktop. The most liberating thing when I switched to laptop gaming was this. With a desktop I feel chained in place, it’s not the nicest feeling.

- Keyboard: I don’t know whether you’ve used a modern laptop’s keyboard, but they’re wonderful, simply wonderful. The problem with standard keyboards is that the keys are too deep, and they require much more effort to press, thus putting greater strain on the wrists, this is a nice way to introduce RSI. I don’t have RSI, and one of the two reasons for this is the laptop keyboard (the other is my trackball). I’ve used ergo keyboards, I’ve used all sorts of keyboards, but the quietest keyboard (no clicky keys), the most pleasant keyboard to use, the most comfortable by far is the laptop keyboard. Plus, it’s quieter than a desktop keyboard for when I’m typing, and again, noise is a concern for me. Laptop keyboards seem almost luxurious compared to the keyboards I used to use, it’s like going from typing on stiff rubber to silk.

- Almost everything in one place: I put a little extra money into this laptop to have a decent webcam in it. So I have a good webcam, a mic, the monitor, and the aforementioned keyboard all in the same space. When I close my laptop and carry it off with me, the only other thing I need to make space for is my trackball. There’s no need for me to have a million peripherals connected with loads of wires (I hate wire-mess). In fact, I have but two wires; that of my trackball and for power. The areas which I use my laptop aren’t that messy at all, and I kind of like it that way.

That’s why I’ll be a laptop gamer from now on, I expect. Now the cons:

- Hardware: A laptop can’t ever match a desktop PC in this regard, but then again, what games are there out there right now that use that kind of hardware? Left 4 Dead, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Mass Effect 2, and the mainstream games I want to play are easily handled by lower end hardware, and they still look amazing. Perhaps the only two games recently that could test my computer is that space shooter from Futuremark and Just Cause 2. I’m not interested in either because I’m not a huge fan of third person games or competitive shooty games. There might come a time when a new game will be so amazing that I’ll have to upgrade to desktop level hardware to play it. Then I’ll have a very tough choice to make.

As long as I can play the games I want to play, that’s all that matters to me and as long as I can play them on a laptop, that’s what I’ll do. I love all the boons the laptop affords me, because not many people could relocate their gaming computer to a sunny spot for a good game of whatever their poison is, whilst enjoying the sun.

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Oracles Cave
Battecars
Rebelstar Raiders
Swords of Bane
Fairlight
Tir Nar Nog
Ghostbusters

Also on Ultima 2 on the Atari, we could never get enough gold to buy the power armour so you could travel in the spacecraft and survive. Very frustrating!

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But wouldn’t that weigh nineteen pounds and melt countertops? My name is Ozymandias, king of kings! Look on my laptop, ye might, and despair… It’s a very solid piece of hardware, but that kind of laptop is so not for me – even if it didn’t cost four times what the off-the-shelf components would. But don’t listen to me, if it keeps you gaming happily, more power to you.

That page also had one of the greatest disclaimers I’ve ever read. Personalized nameplate not available in Nordic languages. This is what happens when you cut corners on egraving software, people.

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As the saying goes ‘Science (and public opinion), changes, funeral by funeral’
:)

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You had to start windows from Norton Commander by going into C:\windows and typing win. :p
And a little later, with the Voodoo revolution in graphics card. I remember I was in high school when Diablo first hit. That was a major breakthrough. :p

So many memories…

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http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/notebooks/laptop-alienware-m17x/pd.aspx?refid=laptop-alienware-m17x&cs=19&s=dhs

I’ll let the specs speak, for I need to say nothing more.

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The games I got started on were Age of Empires, Baldur’s Gate, and Civ 2, but that wasn’t until substantially later. Circa 1998. No, 1993 saw me years away from even learning the dos commands to play tetris.

Somehow I’m not surprised to see so many ancients kicking around here. If I were being self-servingly flattering, I might say it’s because PC gaming tends to attract a different crowd than the primarily console-playing crowd. I might use the words sophisticated, discerning, mature, or mature at heart. But of course that’s obvious flamebait, so I won’t mention it.

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