My laptop died, time to perform some surgery.

The main problem I can see with Alienware is it's a division of Dell. Dell is.. not the best record. Soemtimes they're great! Sometimes they're not. I've heard good stuff about them but I can't confirm, considering the cost they demand for one. Toshiba might be good. From personal experience I had one back when. It still works, although the power adapter plug sleeve came loose, and the laptop being over 12 years old has long since been replaced with much nicer hardware. Never had an issue with them, but again it's personal experience only.
 
There were a great deal of nvidia laptop GPU's that were frying around 2008. HP got the worst rap for the issue, but Dells and some other brands were also affected. When I was managing an Office Depot store, people would pay $300 for us to ship it out to Nexicore in California and after they replaced the GPU, sometimes it would only last a couple months. When I worked in a PC repair shop, they put the gpu in the oven and it seemed to work. There are video tutorials on youtube for that, if you would like to try it, if your gpu fails again.
 
Well I couldn't wait to save up for a really nice laptop and I've just put in an order for the Levono IdeaPad Z500. It looks like the best bang for your buck laptop, even though it has a few annoying problems.

It cost me £410 and it has a i5 (2.6GHz) processor, 4GB ram, 1TB hard drive and a nVidia GT35M graphics card (unfortunately the lesser of the 2 versions of this card). It should be good enough to play most current games on medium settings. It's cons are some models have a patchy wi-fi speed (they alternate between 3 different cards), the hard drive is slow and noisy and you have to remove 23 screws just to change the hard drive.

If all goes well I should get it this Saturday.
 
It's certainly not a high-end laptop, that's for sure.. but it does have the benefit of being decently priced.

Does it have room in the drive bay for a second laptop HD? And does it include cable plugs to attach a second one in row? Cause then you could put in a tiny little solid state drive as a boot and system, and use the 1tb one for storage and such.
 
Finally got my laptop on the 31st December. Took me a day to set up Windows 8. Upgraded to Windows 8.1. Took me another day to sort out all the problems it caused. (It messed up the graphics drivers: the screen was on minimum brightness and it was stuck on Intel graphics in games). I forgot to deauthorise Photoshop on my old laptop before it died again, so I'll need to get in touch with Adobe because I can't re-install it on my new laptop.

It's such a pain migrating to a new system. I still have a few still left to set-up but the essentials are now done.

Good news is I tried out Skyrim, as it's nice and scalable, and it works with pretty much all of the eye candy on.

Does it have room in the drive bay for a second laptop HD? And does it include cable plugs to attach a second one in row? Cause then you could put in a tiny little solid state drive as a boot and system, and use the 1tb one for storage and such.

It only has one bay but has a USB 3 port into which I've plugged in my Steam games overflow drive. I usually swap out the hard drive in my laptops with a Momentus XT drive but Seagate have stopped making them. (A pity because they really sped up my old laptops).
 
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