By Michael Stanton

The first video game, astonishingly, was developed in the 1950's. It was developed as a project for A.S. Dougal's PhD degree. To think, a simple edition of Tic-Tac-Toe was the result. It was two decades later that the first commercial home game console was released - this was the Odyssey, designed by Ralph Baer. Magnavox released the game. The Odyssey incased twelve games. The home game console was released in 1972 and a year before that Nolan Bushnell, as well as Ted Dabney produced the first arcade game. This game - Computer Space - was based on Nolan's Spacewar game. The following year, Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn hit gold with the release of their new arcade game: Pong! With this great new game, everyone wanted to be the master of Pong! When they realized the potential, Bushnell and Dabney's new company - Atari - released Pong! as a home video game. This was in 1975.

The computer gaming industry is now a billion dollar business. Those hardcore gamers still fondly remember Pong! but for most it is naught but a distant memory. From a humble beginning sprouted a gigantic industry. Serious gamers will tell you that buying a gaming PC or gaming laptop should not be done without professional input and lots of thought. In today's world, most people require laptops or notebooks because of their mobility. Many different laptops can be found on the market today and when buying gaming laptops you should take the following factors into consideration:

Processor The processor is the most important part of your laptop - especially so with gaming laptops. Recent games need at least a 1.6 GHz processor but they recommend a 2 GHz processor. Anything less than this will most likely not be suitable for the newest and best games.

Memory After the CPU, Memory is most definitely the most important component to consider when buying a gaming laptop. Don't be too economical when deciding on the size of memory you require. A low memory will drastically slow your computer, and will surely frustrate any self respecting gamer. You will need to buy a laptop with RAM memory of at least 1GB; however, it is strongly recommended that you don't settle for anything under 2GB, as newer games need a lot of memory to give the best possible results. As for memory speed, it is recommended that you don't settle for anything under 667Mhz.

Graphics Whether you are playing strategy games, war games or racing games, you need a great graphics card to truly appreciate the experience. You should definitely opt for the latest graphics processor with dedicated memory. Definitely do not settle for a graphics card with less than 512MB dedicated memory. Though, even that has become quite a low amount of dedicated memory.

Hard Drive With how fast technology changes and improves, you will find that what was sufficient a few years ago is less than acceptable today. A 100GB hard drive is nowadays laughable to most serious gamers and 500GB is even less than sufficient. A saving grace is that portable hard drives of 1GB up to and exceeding 1TB is available and you just need to hook it up to your computer to add to your hard drive space.

Optical Drive With the optical drive (CD, DVD ect.) you can settle for something a bit cheaper as this does not rely on specific speeds or other necessities. The only thing you need to consider is if you want a multiformat (DVD RW) DVD burner.

Display No self-respecting gamer will settle for a gaming laptop with a screen size less than 19 inches. Go with maximum resolution available on the screen size of your choice, as this will enhance your viewing pleasure whenever you decide to pop in a movie dvd or blu-ray disc. It will also seem to greatly improve the graphics output of your chosen game.

As you can see, there are many things to consider when buying a gaming laptop, and you should not take to this challenge without advice from professionals if you are new to gaming. Ask around, and remember to shop around. Computer sales are a competitive environment, and you may be surprised by some of the specials out there.

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