What laptop brands are best?

[Red Celt]

Looks like a good spec, to me. You'll be well-covered for Office, anyway, and some games too (if gaming is your thing).

Well, I'm looking at going back into World of Warcraft when the fall semester is up, but that's a game that's made a conscious effort to be playable even on out of date technology. Might consider a few other games like Minecraft, too, but not really on my mind atm.

Well, on an i7 with 8Gb of memory, WoW should be fine. Biggest processor hits happen on high-end raids with lots of spell effects happening at the same time. A 5-man instance crawl will be a doddle. Even with pandas.