Maximum PC

Hi all

As the subject says, I am in the market for a smaller laptop with a decent video card. I bought a toshba u205 on ebay but the LCD has a ton of dead pixels and I'm returning it (ad made no mention about the pixels).

I'm mostly going to be using the laptop to make ghost and acronis images of hard drives on site for work, but want to be able to play some everquest and guildwars on occasion (business trips, or while waiting for files to transfer, images to be made etc). I was not able to find a list on google showing which laptops had upgradeable video cards, so I am hoping I can get pointed in the right direction as to which used/refurb laptop models in the stated size ranges will either come with better than Intel onboard graphics, or at the very least be easily upgradeable to something more current...wouldn't mind using one that uses a mobile nvidia 6800 but 7600 or 8400 would be a little more pleasing.

Thanks in advance for anyone that may reply, you have my gratitude. I am trying to stay in the $400-600 range but might go a little higher for a new/newer laptop if it's appealing enough.

Those small sized laptops are extremely hard to find with discrete graphics at all. The best I've seen in a 13 incher is a geforce 9300gs, which is pretty horrible (think very low settings at 1024x768 resolution on a game from 2006, like oblivion) And this was on a top of the line laptop that was $2200. It will be VERY hard to find a laptop with a discrete graphics card for $600 at all, let alone an ultraportable one. If a 15.4 inch laptop is acceptable, then you have a couple of options (but nothing that will get high settings). Alternatively you could bump your budget up by quite a bit to get decent graphics in an ultraportable.

Yeah, you aren't going to get a small laptop with a GPU for that low of a price. However, you could look at laptops with integrated Radeon HD 3200 or Geforce 9300 or 9200 or whatever the equivalent is. My friend has a laptop with the 3200 and he can play TF2 pretty well at medium or high settings. I think HP might have one.

Here, this is 15.4" but it's $500 and has the HD 3200 as its base spec.
http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopp ... v5z_series

You can upgrade to a 3450 which is slightly better but I think based on the same GPU as the 3200. For light gaming, either would be fine.

Oh, here's a 14" one with the 3200.

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopp ... v4z_series

How about the Asus N10J

It has a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 2GB RAM, and a hybrid graphics solution. When you're gaming, it activates the discrete nVidia 9300M and when you don't need heavy GPU power, it switches back to the integrated Intel GMA 950.