Good laptop?

My cousin wants to get a laptop. He needs it for college and wants to be able to play games on it. Something that can run current games half decently. I think he was particularly thinking about Diablo. right now he mostly plays WOW and LOL, butwill be buying more intense stuff once he has a better system.

I havent kept up with the latest tech for quite a while. Even if i had I never really looked into laptops at all. I was wondering what a good brand to look at would be and if anyone could recommend anything. I was thinking about maybe the Alienware Mx14 or something. But i heard Alienware isn't what it used to be. I think they got bought out a while back. Personally i had a Dell XPS which was awesome when it worked, but it had heat problems and earlier this year the gfx card fried. So im not sure if i can recommend dell. hes got roughly a 1600 dollar budget

In summary he needs it for:
-Gaming (Diablo III and other recent games)
-School (should be moderately portable)
- has ~$1,600 budget

can anyone recommend either a specific rig, or at the very least a brand thats half decent? I really have no idea what brands are half decent, other than knowing that gateway is pretty shitty.

Dell alienware m11x?

Don't have experience with these, but I'm thinking about getting one of them for college next year.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220957
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152286
The Asus is freaken huge though.

hmm well Asus makes decent cases and ok monitors. Dont know how good their laptops are.. anyone know?

Ive personally had bad experiences with MSI motherboards years ago. not sure if they've improved. Im still not too sure about Alienware. I heard they got bought by Dell years ago and have kinda gone to shit

[quote name='Kenshindono']hmm well Asus makes decent cases and ok monitors. Dont know how good their laptops are.. anyone know?

Ive personally had bad experiences with MSI motherboards years ago. not sure if they've improved. Im still not too sure about Alienware. I heard they got bought by Dell years ago and have kinda gone to shit[/QUOTE]

Asus is one of the best laptop manfucture

I'm currently posting from my 2 day old HP latop, and so far I really like it... but I think I had a much different set of criteria for making my choice than you (I was focused on multitask web surfing, video streaming, and 'not a damn black one'.)

At the very least, HP had good reviews in general when I was looking into it...

check out ibuypower.com. reasonable prices and he should be able to afford a good gaming laptop at that price.

also http://www.woot.com/

Yeah, personally, I would be extremely, extremely wary of Asus. My former roommate bought one last winter (Feb) with his tax return. It broke to the point where it failed to POST by late March (i.e. about one month). He sent it in immediately. It took them until AUGUST to get it fixed and back to him. I work part-time as an independent contractor fixing laptops for a few other companies (mostly Sony and Toshiba) under their on-site warranty service, and I can tell you firsthand that they FLIP out if it takes more than a few days after receipt of the parts to get a job done. Asus, however, is apparently perfectly comfortable letting their customers languish for months on end without their machines. Unacceptable.

I know them well from back in the day when I worked for an IT dept at a large university--their mobos and vid cards were first rate. Personally, however, having seen what I've seen of the laptops and esp. their warranty service, it'd basically have to be half the cost of a competitor for me to take a dip in those waters. The breakdown is one thing--stuff can happen to machines from any maker, it's hard to hold it against them, but that repair took close to _half a year_. Ye gods. Personally, I can typically field strip a laptop, replace the mobo and rebuild it in about 2 to 2 1/2 hours, so 5 months is pretty tough to swallow.