What laptop do you own?

I have a Lenovo IdeaPad Y470. It's a pretty good laptop for games, but it tends to overheat due to seemly an excessive amount of thermal paste applied to the CPU; like 50x more than what is necessary based on a couple of pictures taken by actual owners who took their Y470 apart to clean up that sloppy mess an apply an appropriate amount of thermal paste. That dropped temps down from around 92C to 70C when playing games. I would do the same with mine except I purchased a 2 year extended warranty and taking apart my laptop will void it... but I am very tempted...

However, from a productivity standpoint it is a bit lacking primarily due to the 1366x768 screen. It makes working with multiple windows/programs a bit difficult especially when you are trying to reference data between programs. Many times I would need to move windows around the screen to juggle whatever I am trying to do. Needless to say it is very annoying.

I am thinking about replacing this laptop; which I bought back in August 2011; sometime next year after Intel releases their upcoming Haswell CPU. The new laptop will have higher resolution which will make multi-tasking much easier. I'm am not sure if I will go with a 1600x900 14" screen or 1920x1080 15.6" screen. It will likely be a business class laptop rather than a gaming laptop.

If I were to buy a new laptop this year, it would likely boil down to a Lenovo ThinkPad T430, T430s, or X1 Carbon.

Dell Vostro 3400... Runs Blizzard games on low and that's pretty much it  

Sony Viao VPCEE22FX which I've had for almost two years now - replaced HSF after the fan failed, had a few issues with it related to heat but it is running happily now (again). At two years old, it is the second oldest laptop I've owned. The longest running was an IBM thinkpad purchased in 2001 for ~$2500 and used until 2007. The shortest lived laptop I've owned was an Acer which died one week after warranty expired.
If I were to start travelling again, and needed a new laptop (it's almost that time since my gaming is now done on the lowest settings with just barely acceptable frame rates) I think I would get a Sager or Lenovo.

Like, maybe, five years old?

I personally use an HP DV6195. it has a core I7 2630qm and an AMD HD6770. plays games really nicely but also has switchable graphics (between the 6770m and the CPU's HD3000) and the so it can be used for productive things too without sucking the battery down. Using MSI afterburner I managed to squeeze out another 150MHZ out of the GPU (6770m) and temps are still normal for a laptop
I think HP has a newer model now with an ivy bridge CPU and AMD GCN or Nvidia keplar out now.


as far as deciding on a lappy in my opinion It all depends on things like

What kind of a budget are you on?
What do you plan on doing with your lappy?
what are your priorities? (battery life, high performance, portability)

I buy only Clevo laptops, custom built to my specifications. be careful of brand comparisons as you'll often find the this brand is better than that brand arguments somewhat silly as it oft turns out that both "brands" were manufactured by the same outfit. I'd venture to guerss that 9 outta 10 brands you can name don't actually make a laptop.

The vast majority of laptops on the market are manufactured by a small handful of Original Design Manufacturers (ODM). Major relationships include:

Quanta sells to (among others) HP, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Toshiba, Dell, Sony, Fujitsu and NEC
Compal sells to (among others) Acer, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and HP/Compaq
Wistron (former manufacturing & design division of Acer) sells to Dell, Acer, Lenovo and HP
Inventec sells to Toshiba, HP and Lenovo
Pegatron sells to Asus, Toshiba, Apple, Dell and Acer
Foxconn sells to Asus, Dell, HP and Apple
Flextronics (former Arima Computer Corporation notebook division) sells to HP

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/91510-clevo...

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You will find that most boutique outfits selling gaming laptops are selling Clevo laptops. List of dealers here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clevo

For work I use a Lenovo T510 and a Lenovo X220i. Both are fabulous machines for that purpose, I especially love the X220i when traveling as it is super light, has a fabulous keyboard, and a very good battery life.

For home I still have an older Asus N80vn that just will not die and still plays even many newer games so I haven't been able to pull the trigger on upgrading it yet (use a desktop primarily for gaming though), however I am seriously debating on purchasing a new Lenovo Y580 as a mobile gaming/multimedia upgrade from the old Asus.