So I've decided to upgrade....

[R.A.V.S.O]

Here's the thing, no PC or laptop lasts forever, and with that being said, my laptop's on the brink of death,

with constant BSOD's and overheating I've decided it's time for a new laptop and with good reason too,
I can barely run any of the incoming game titles, and working on unity has been turning more into a
save every 5-10 minutes to avoid sudden loss of work kind of experience,

so I've been wondering, with a budget of $800 is there a decent (possibly gaming?) laptop I could go
and buy?

shipping or going physically to a store shouldn't be a problem since I live near the border of California
and one of my friends has a PO box I can use should I order online

I know I can probably get better results by building a desktop PC for gaming/programming but
since I'm pretty much 90% of the time away from home I could really use a good laptop,

thanks in advance for any possible suggestions

[Blizzard]

Maybe not a gaming laptop, but Dell's laptops are pretty good now. I own one right now. I bought it over 2 years ago and I'm satisfied with it.

[R.A.V.S.O]

with my budget as-is, probably not,

at the moment I'm claiming a few favors I've had in order to increase the budget a bit, not 100% guaranteed but
in a best case scenario I'd probably end with $1000 to spend, but for now I'm at the $800 mark.

guess I'll keep on looking for deals on either amazon or ebay, sadly Mexico's craiglist is pretty crappy atm...

[winkio]

try to browse a lot of different sites, especially different manufacturers like HP, lenovo, dell, etc.  I got my current laptop because it was 20% off on Microsoft's website ($1200, down from $1500).  If you keep looking a lot of different places, you should be able to find a good deal within your price range.

[Blizzard]

You should definitely first pick a configuration that suits you and then check out the manufacturers and what they offer. e.g. I wanted an i7 with 4 cores (8 virtual ones) so I tried to find the cheapest laptop that had an i7. I was lucky to find one that also had a decent GPU.

[R.A.V.S.O]

I'm kind of a noob on this one but bear with me please,

when searching for a laptop, should I prioritize on the CPU (number of cores, i5 vs i7) or GPU? (such as nvidia graphics)

then again I could also take the distant third option of getting a good desktop PC and settle for a mild laptop for
work related programming.

but all in all I'm still willing to look for a good gaming laptop should I find the opportunity to look for it,

this one caught my attention but it's still in preorder: http://www.amazon.com/Dell-Inspiron-i7559-763BLK-Full-HD-GeForce/dp/B015PYYDMQ

I'll keep on searching for now.

[Blizzard]

It's a good laptop. Its CPU is weaker than on mine, but its GPU is much better. I switched my 750 GB HDD for a 500 GB SSD just recently and I love it. <3 If you will be performing HDD-access extensive operations, SSDs are perfect for this. Plus, the boot time is cut down to usually under half a minute.

To decide whether to focus on CPU/GPU is easy. If you are going to play games, you will need both, but the GPU should probably have priority. If you want to make games, a decent GPU is a must, but a better CPU is more useful (especially when you compile or run stuff in debug-mode). (Remember that RMXP runs solely on CPU!) If you need to perform certain calculations that might need a lof of CPU, obviously you would benefit from a good CPU. If you want to surf the Internet and log into Facebook, you don't need either. An i3 would be enough in this case. i5s are the mid-end ones and i7 are the high-end ones, but you will usually notice that laptops with i7 CPUs are significantly more expensive than i5 laptops. Whether to go with NVidia or AMD for your GPU is not really imporants. NVidia is slightly better, but a usually a lot more expensive. It depends on what you want.

[R.A.V.S.O]

Alright so updating on this topic,

I decided to go ahead and get that laptop (it also helps that amazon for some weird reason decided to bump down the prize by $60)
and if all goes smoothly should be arriving next week. S&H is still a bit crappy when it comes to Mexico so I managed
to get an acquaintance of mine to order it on his PO box, (yay free shipping!)

as an aftermath I've got around $20-30 remaining possibly for a game, any recommendations from you guys?
Battlefront atm is out of my league but I'm pretty sure they'll be offers around the corner sooner or later.