renegade gh0st

I'm getting a brand new laptop and i am looking for a game that is going to last me till July 27th.... (SC2)

spec overview ati 5870, i7-720qm, 8gb ddr3 ram....

the game needs to be fairly new and somewhat eye candy.... (but more importantly fun).. (if expansions exist for game i will prob buy them also....)

some of my options are: just cause 2, crysis, metro 2033, bfbc2.... I am open to other suggestions as well, but note i plan on only getting one (1) game...

i have a lot of 1 mm thick or so blue lines running down my screen... only replacing black (all other colors remain unaffected... and the monitor is still fully operational...) it is connected via vga... i reseated the cable and tried a different vga cable..... reseated the video card.....

it is my secondary monitor as my primary is connected via dvi and is working normally....

I think it may just be the vga port failing on video card.... (other thoughts)

*I will test monitor on another computer to make sure it is not monitor that broken

okay so i have been looking at ssd upgrades.... (intel ones)

I know the drastic increase in performance

The little better power consumption

What i want to know is longevity...... How long could a heavy user expect for the drive to last.....

I have 2x500gb 7200 rpm.... in short don't need a third of the space.....

so wnat to replace the primary drive with ssd for os..... just want to know how long i can expect the drive to last compared to a normal HDD

I don't mind shelling out the money ($225+) for the drive, but i will not buy it if it will fail in a year or two.......

Just insight on the longevity of the drive would be helpful.... (sorry for nonsensical question....)

Okay so my question is will a 4 pole 3.5mm stereo jack (ie lets say the i phone headphones w/ mic) work in a 3 pole socket (like a regular ipod (shuffle etc)).

I know the mic will not work, but would the stereo on the headphones work like a normal 3 pole....?

or would it just not work at all?

What is important to me in a laptop.

1. sheer power (more later)

2. price ($1700 absolute max.. pref in 1550 range)

3.dependibility

4. Not Mac (various reasons... (over priced, will be programming)

5. Cool knick knacks/semi-useful addons (I.E. backlit keyboard)

6. Screen sice (15-17in)

7. no overheating (would put up to to some degree like extended 100% CPU and 100% GPU usage triggers a shutdown....)

10. style

Things that do NOT matter to me

1. mobility

2. battery life (its gonna be plugged in 95%+ of the time)

My uses: .... everything from surfing the web to documents to gaming (consider myself moderate gamer I like the best of the best but not willing to pay for minor increase)

Points of interest:

I consider myself tech savy and a master of self troubleshooting......(I have learned much from my mistakes... don't always do things correctly but i will get it fixed and useable)

Planning on doing a clean wipe of any lappy i get to correctly partition drives and get rid of bloat ware

In terms of hardware I have worked a lot on towers and could assemble one from scratch, but i would rather not mess with the innards of a lappy i would if necessary change out RAM and mybe even put a SSD in

Suggestions w/ brand and line of lappy

I have been thinking of the Asus g73jh-a1 (maybe -A2 but prob not)

The machine is as far as i can tell the best bang for your buck, but due to reading some forums.... (okay couple hundred pages of forums) their appears to be a fairly large RMA rate so considering alternatives....

(not too concerened with having to RMA it unless still hard to get in the next 3-5 months.....)

(I want a stable system in terms of hardware.....)

1. Partitioning hard drives.... does it boost system performance signifigantly/slightly/notwortheffort/no

2.Multiple OS partitioning (ex: linux and w7 on dif partitions)-- does it slow performance

3. multiple active OS.... (curious read something about how possible if multiple cores on processor)

4. multiple Hard drive petitioning (2+ internal drives)

5. Suggestions for Partitioning schemes (give list w/ suggested sizes either in percent or size (working w/ 2 500gb hard drives......))

OR

link to site w/ information and RECENT (i want discussion on XP+ era)