Simmytu

Crash Day together with Red Alert 2 were my first PC games but all of my childhood hours, at least a huge chunk of them, were spent on a PSP with GTA Liberty and Vice City Stories (that I still play time to time).

The i5 4690K is what you need to look at :-)

What type of gaming experience do you expect your brother dealing with? Browser games or more of puzzle type of games or (worst case scenario) first person shooters like Battlefield and CoD. Acer low budget line shares the same so called "you get what you pay for" products, just like HP. And besides browser games and really low requirement games from 2000's/ 2005, I personally don't expect much from gaming because of their Intel HD onboard graphics. (The Intel HD 3000 wil do better at gaming then what this Acer has to offer). But generally I don't recommend laptops with Celerons and Pentiums (AMD's Essential series and A4 APU's included) because they are way too slow for any modern usage except for maybe dedicated email/ school devices.

Well a $200 laptop is definitely not sounding great especially from a company (Tbh almost every laptop that's under $600 has had some terrible compromises to be made) that's famous for it's "you get for what you pay for". What I personally think about is that HP and/ or Microsoft want to compete within the price range of Chromebooks, which is great for students like me and a lot of you guys :-D But I still have some trust issues with the words laptop and cheap. Hopefully HP doesn't "screw" that much up and deliver something that isn't disposable after 1 year of usage, true story happened to our teacher year or two ago Since this topic is going a bit off topic, as usual: Wow, that's one of the weirdest story that I've read today about HP (and laptops in general). My aunt has bought a HP Pavilion laptop with an A8 with dual graphics and such (it was decent spec'd laptop for it's price) and it has been running for about a year and a half now. The only thing I think that HP has screwed some big time here is it's preloaded Windows 8 image. Oh my.. I've never seen such unstable OS in quite a while. Issues like the scaling doesn't work or that one security update made the entire device unusable was actually the worst yet and I had to fix it .

You wouldn't want to know how often I get that answer when I asked my science teacher for a micro usb cable. "I'm sorry (insert a name here) but I'm not quite sure if that Samsung cable is going to fit in your Android phone". Yes, this was her actual reply to my question Later on that day when the bell rang and our science class hour ended I've walked to her and explained to her that most modern smartphones uses micro usb cables and the term Samsung cable shouldn't be used, since they aren't the same thing.

Yeah I have to agree with that. Each card had it's own unique styling and that helped us remember each generation of cards even better. I'm personally found of the stock design of the current gen GTX 770+ series (The 690 and Titan included). I mean Nvidia did put effort in their cards in terms of cooling and appearance. They have to leave room for their board partners to improve on with their custom designed and engineers coolers and PCBs otherwise why would I buy a MSI Twinfrozr GTX 770 if the stock card reaches the same acoustic levels while maintaining acceptable temperatures. Anyway I went quite off topic there. Woohoo that's why I love competition! Price reductions are always great for customers and now they made their cards even more appealing to some more people around here :lol:

My family always bought Packard Bell desktops and laptops, severally the iMedia, iXtreme and Easynote line of products. My first (and last OEM) purchase was a Samsung Chronos 17 770Z7E notebook.

Nope, I didn't select any extra warranty service on that laptop, just the standard 2 year warranty that came with the laptop. I couldn't extract the HDD because the back cover was factory sealed if I opened it it would void the warranty entirely and I wouldn't have any RMA rights.

I definitely know how this would feel, because I've been in the same type of situation. Here is my story, I was terrified as **** when my previous Samsung Chronos laptop decided to give up its life and die with all of my important school documents and reports that I've been working on for the past 4 months (some 3 40 page fully written documents about fire hazard and fire prevention). Firstly I told to myself it was just a random blue screen and everything should be working normally after I restart my laptop. Everything was normal, just like what I've expected but then another blue screen came along with a very high pitched screech sound coming from the main speakers after just 3 minutes of runtime. I've panicked because of the sound. Then I realized my laptop is dying after 5 months of ownership. What could I do, told I to myself. I couldn't just open it since it would void the warranty and have a 3 kg slab of aluminum stuck forever. I turned it back on and plugged a thumb drive in it and started to save as much as possible and after 4 attempts I had recovered most of the important data in that laptop. (I did lose couple of folders full of family pictures unfortunately ). Later on that same week, I RMA'd the laptop to the shop and they gave me full refund of the product after they fully verified that I didn't cause anything by myself. Since then I've learned my lesson and now I'm always backing up my files at Onedrive cloud storage, school server and at home to prevent myself stuck again with this nasty situation.