Giant, hulking laptop advice

[Wolff Dobson]

Along with getting the art and testing done on LGGWG v23, I'm beginning to work on "LGGWG 2: The Quickening", the sequel to LGGWG.  I need a machine that's big enough to really develop on that I can haul around with me.  I imagine I'll mostly be commuting around the house (desk to couch, couch to desk), but now and then hit the road. 

I'd like to be able to hook it up to a second monitor so I can debug and see what I'm debugging at the same time.  LGGWG 2 is going to be (partially) in 3D, so I have to do better than the usual horrendous on-board Intel graphics cards you get in lower-end machines.

I know Dave and Adam use Sagers of some sort, but how has that worked out?  Have other people had success with other sorts of laptop/desktop replacement machines for gaming or development?

I spent the last two evenings animating the Dogbot and the Carpenter units for v23.  Things are coming along!

Wolff

[David McCullough Dobson]

I got a ton of use out of both of my Sagers, and they performed quite
well.

On the minus side, both of them generated a ton of heat (I bear a scar
that, when fresh, was clearly an imprint of the PS2 port in the back of
one of them, after I fell asleep with the thing on and resting on my arm,
branding myself like cattle). With any of the desktop replacements, the
battery life is super-short. With my Sagers, it was about an hour and a
half when new, and dwindled to about 15 minutes by the end. They may have
gotten better about that. They use lots of power (the power supply
adapter block had its own cooling fan). They're heavy as hell -
schlepping the computer and the power cord can get your shoulder sore
pretty fast. They're also noisy - I found that every 3-4 months the thing
would get to where the fans were just screaming constantly, and I'd have
to unscrew the case and peel off the lint and cat hair that had built up
on the heat sink near the fan. The design wasn't much; pretty blocky -
they didn't look cool, but everything was accessible and utilitarian.

On the plus side, I got a huge screen, a very fast processor, a full-size
keyboard with number pad, a desktop-style graphics card that worked on
every game I threw at it for 3-4 years after purchase. Both Sagers were
very reliable under hard use.

I switched to a smaller, sleeker laptop two years ago, and added a brawny
desktop for the basement, and that fits my computing needs a little better
now, but if I wanted to go back to a single computer, I'd definitely look
at Sagers again.

If you're looking for a good place to shop, I found pctorque.com very
helpful and knowledgeable, and they helped me very promptly when I had a
keyboard issue with the second one - not a big deal; it started bulging up
a little and I got a replacement under warranty.

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[Adam Gousetis]

I second all of Dave's statements. pctorque is where I got my Sager as well. The forums seemed to have the most intelligent posts in terms of technical service, and I got updated roms in the mail when i asked for them. My battery has also gone from 2 hours to about 15 minutes, but I have had my laptop for about 3 years now.

My laptop doesn't brand me from ps/2 ports, but the mic and speaker jacks on the front get scarringly hot at times. I also found that the sound card was not sufficiently shielded from electrical interference, so I got a USB headset and solved both problems. Having a 17 inch screen, the surface area of the laptop keeps it cooler than some other laptops, but it is very uncomfortable in the summer, both for my lap, and for the video card (I underclock the video card in the summer, though I should just clean out the fans). But having a full size keyboard with numpad is very nice, especially for those few games that require the numpad ( i.e. Allegiance and Final Fantasy XI).