In Need of Technological Advice

I'm in the market for a new laptop. unfortunately, I have very little knowledge when it comes to things like memory, processors, which brands are more reliable than others, etc.

Could someone recommend a laptop of some sort with some of the following paramaters?

-Able to run good-quality but not incredible games without crashing/lagging much, such as Minecraft or TF2.

-Built-in webcam or microphone.

-Costs 400 dollars or less.

Any help would be much appreciated

I can't give you any exact recommendations but I can tell you about my experience.


First off I recommend you stay away from HP. I have (what I'm using right now) an hp laptop. Its a little over two years old (three this july) and I have had several problems with it. Mainly the hdd crashing on me a few months ago costing me 200+ dollars and the processor not running as advertised. My laptop should be able to out preform most laptops sold around the same time with its "high end" amd processor (not going to get into that you likely don't care) and I have had it crash when attempting to run things as old as Phantasy Star Blue Burst.

So what do I recommend? For what you want any mid-end laptop should fit the bill. Just look for the basics. 4-8 gigs of ram, that should be more than enough for casual gaming. 500gigs to 1tb of hard drive space. This will give you enough room to have games, photos and music on your computer. lastly try to get a newer intel processor. A dual core i3 should suite you and they are rather cheap for what they do. If you can spring on an i5 but that sounds like it would be overkill.

Lenovo makes some awesome computers. My sister has had one for about a year now and it has no issues and runs just like it did on day one. She's even dropped it a few times and hasn't had it fail in any way as a result. Hers cost around 450. Also my buddy has an newer acer he picked up last year but the monitor doesn't work anymore. It ran fantastically for being just under $300 but I can't recommend it. On the other hand, my dad has an acer net book that he's been running for almost 5 years now. Its slow as hell with an Intel Atom in it but the thing is old.

Now that windows 8 is out a lot of the windows 7 computers are going for cheap so I'd try and jump on that as soon as you have the money. I myself haven't used windows 8 yet and have switched over to a Mac as my main computer. I'd recommend a macbook but its well out of what you're wanting to spend.


Hope this helps! I may get bored and give you a few links.