I have been looking a dekstop-replacement laptop that can be used in all sorts of entertainment fields. I am a university student and I wouls use my laptop as follows: 60% writing&surfing the net, 30% music&digital pics (non-professional) and 10% gaming (Half-Life 2!). Now I have been back and forth in deciding which brand and model to get. Firtst I thought of getting Apple Powerbook, then Alienware laptop and then HP-Compaq's NX8220 (aka NC8230). None of these seemed right for me: wrong videocard (must be Ati), too ugly (HP's all-black notebook, Alienware's bulky and plain ugly) or the features weren't right (Apple Powerbook and games=bad performance).

Finally, I hit a jackpot. Acer has released a next-generation Centrino laptop called TravelMate 8100. Now don't get me wrong, I am still very sceptical of Acer: in the past they have had more problems than almost any other laptop brand when it comes to tilting, overheating, breaking or something to that effect. However, TravelMate has been getting some great reviews and some have said that Acer has fixed many problems that have occured in previous models.

Acer has apparently made their keyboards better but I do not know if they come close to IBM or HP. The specs in TravelMate 8100 are amazing: 2,0 GHz Pentium-M, Ati Mobility Radeon X700 128Mb, PCI express, 4 USB slots et cetera. However, there is no Firewire800 (only the slower Firewire).

TravelMate 8100 does well with HL2 according to review. One problems that is has, though, is that its native resolution (1680x1050) is not compatible with most games and it is recommended that for example HL2 is played with lower resolutions.

I think this will be my next computer. I was just about give up and choose a desktop but luckily a laptop with great specs came along. And did I mention that TravelMate 8100's price is amazingly low: in Finland it costs 2000 euros which is probably about the same in dollars. However, I will be adding the extra 512MB memory to get full 1GB of RAM.