Good Laptop or no?

[johnmckenzie]

That's not too dissimilar to mine - Sorry to disappoint but I think you need a higher spec.

[MugHug]

Try Tiger Direct http://www.tigerdirect.com.

Have purchased many items from them and never an issue.

Always have sales and the shipping rates are low if not free. They sell new and refurbished.

If you live in the right state, you gain by not being charged sales tax.

Might give you a bit more buying power.

As far as the Gateway, there is nothing user up-gradable that will really help TS2012 performance. Yes you can install a SSD hard drive or maybe upgrade memory but the two key components that affect TS2012 are the CPU and GPU, which are not up-gradable. How fast the hard drive loads TS2012 will not really help compared to the cost and the 4Gb of memory is enough to get away with.

:)

[MugHug]

I would go for the Gateway.

CPU is a lot more powerful while the video side is the same.

Good site to compare the laptops, CPUs and GPUs. http://www.notebookcheck.net/

[harryadkins]

My son has the HP laptop you mentioned. It runs Railworks pretty good.

[arizonachris]

The Gateway has a better CPU. A Turion CPU is a neutered Athlon 64, kinda like a Celeron is a neutered Pentium 4. Phenom II quad beats a Turion any day.

If it's possible to upgrade the video card (they both have an ATI HD 4250 video) to something in the 5xxx series would be great. And if you can go to Win 7 64 bit, upgrade the RAM to 8Gb, if it's possible. Some boards will only support a certain amount. And allocate as much system RAM to the video card. 256Mb shared memory isn't gonna work well. You need at least 1Gb shared memory for the video if you want all the TSX goodness.