all round laptop for a grand?

[noah]

i'm a med student who gets placed all around wales, changing every 6 weeks, most of these placements are over 3 hours drive from my house so i stay in on-site accomodation. problem is i miss my computer...would be so nice to have a tv/dvd/music/games machine all in one! so......i went to hsbc and they will loan me a grand or so to get one

been looking at the mesh systems, they seems to have good gfx - 9700 M11's - which look promising, there are 3 to look at £1099 for the athlon 64 or p4 version or £1299 for the p4 version with a few extras:

AMD Athlon™ 64 3400+ Processor
512MB DDR400 RAM
60GB ATA-100 EIDE Hard Disk Drive
128MB ATI Radeon M11 - Mobility 9700 Graphics
17.1" TFT WXGA+ Active Colour Screen (1440x900)
£1099

or

Intel Pentium 4- 3.2GHz HT Processor
512MB DDR400 RAM
60GB ATA-100 EIDE Hard Disk Drive
128MB ATI Radeon M11 - Mobility 9700 Graphics
17.1" TFT WXGA+ Active Colour Screen (1440x900)
£1099

or

Intel Pentium 4- 3.4GHz HT Processor
512MB DDR400 RAM
60GB ATA-100 EIDE Hard Disk Drive
!!!256MB!!! ATI Radeon M11 - Mobility 9700 Graphics
17.1" TFT WXGA+ Active Colour Screen (1440x900)
bluetooth and wireless
£1299

really cant seem to decide? my gut says the athlon 64 is the way to go as im not sure whether the extra gfx ram will make a difference as it is still at the same speed.

the other possibility is the new mobile 9800 chip in the dell's but they dont seem to be for sale yet

thanks

[Marcos]

P4s apparently cant keep up with the A64s in games i've heard, so i'd just go for the A64 one.

Have you thought about a Shuttle and a decent TFT for the same price? You could easily beat that spec. 17" TFT with fast response time and an A64 shuttle with a 6800 128mb card