Best budget ($500-$650ish) laptop?

Where are you at, i.e. UK, Canada, Australia and where do you want to buy from?

Sorry Mod, should have stated off the bat. I'm located in Ontario Canada. GTA Region.

Also, big box stores or online resources are fine. I'm aware Intel will be rolling out their new chip soon (or so I'm informed) and part of me would love to hold out, but I need this for school this semester, so the wait isn't much of an option.

As far as newegg canada goes, there isn't much within your budget that could handle gaming. However, if you can spend a bit more, the following 2 will work:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1683...
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1683...

Thoughts on:

http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/product/gateway-gateway-... ???

It looks like it has a solid I3 with a graphics card.

That's not a bad deal at all. The 5650 should be able to handle games on low settings (modern games, of course). Take a look at the GPU link in my sig to get an idea of what kind of performance to expect from it.

It might be the best buy I'm going to get I think. Though I've heard some wary things about a shite touch pad and apparently some units have a tendency to emit a high pitched sound. Not all, but some. The touch pad is fine, I'll be using a mouse.

That's the best deal I came up with over on RedFlagDeals.ca, but I was advised by a tech friend to check Toms before I made and final decisions.

Oh! One other unit of note, someone showed me this link, but I'm less familiar with AMD processors as I am with Intel, so I'm not sure how it stacks up.

http://www.staples.ca/ENG/Catalog/cat_sku.asp?webid=909...

How comparable are the two?

The link doesn't take me to the laptop's specs- just a postal code prompt. Anyways, I'd steer clear of the AMD processors for ANY gaming purposes, as if you were to look at the CPU link in my sig, you'd see that the AMD CPU's are way behind the Intel CPU's in terms of performance.

Anyone else have any tips before I go shopping?