Most 'gaming' laptops these days come with the Nvidia GeForce GO 8600M GT chipset, and they're all around the £600 mark, such as this Dell XPS


8600 will run TF2 fine, I use one myself.

I must say Minty thats a pretty damn good deal. Everything on thats better than my machine by a mile.
Especially nice on the monitor.

For TF2 you want a dual core. Quad is a waste. If you do play other games a quad may help, but you will get a better boost from a better graphics card than cpu. The difference between a very fast cpu and a ridiculously fast cpu is actually very little, whereas the difference between an average gfx card and a top end gfx card is immense.

I would always build my own pc, nevr buy prefab. Its all a matter of competence though - if you end up paying someone to put it together or get it running properly you wipe out any savings you have made.

Gigabyte do good cases for around £30.
Scan have a 700 Watt FSP power supply that keeps appearing on today only for around £30.
4 GB of 800mhz DDR2 is about £45.
Processor - E8400 will do you fine. £110ish.
Motherboard - anything with an intel chipset at around the £60 or higher mark will do you.
GFX card - nvidia 8800GT can be found for £75 and will run all but the highest of resolutions fine. If you only run up to 1280 x 1024 you can get away with the 256mb version which is just £45 atm. If you want better than that you have a choice of the ATI 4850 or the 9800GTX+, both between £105 and £120. At £170 you culd get an ATI 4870, but its overkill for TF2.
1TB hard disk £75 @ scan.
DVDRW approx £15.
keyboard £5 - £10
Mouse £5 - £50 depending what you want.
Speakers/headphones - again personal choice.
Monitor - £125 or so for a 22" widescreen, £190 for a 24" widescreen. Ebuyer is good for monitors atm.

Dunno what that comes to, a lot of it depends what you choose. I think you can be competitive with a prefab pc though, certainly for £600 you should be able to get a better spec than the dell Minty posted. However, it was a while ago Minty got his iirc, and for a Dell branded pc thats a pretty competitive price.

If you lack the confidence to build it yourself though its a moot point.

you truly are a god amongst men, so much handy info m8

1 TeraBit? Isn't that 1000 gigs? I only got 2 149 gig HDs.

And for the mouse. I recommend Sidewinder. It fits your hand like a glove and it has the best thumb buttons ever.

1TB drive now £69 incl vat at scan .

Gutted I paid £80 for my 750gb samsung at the end of july.

Theres even a 1.5TB seagate drive on there for just under £140. Unbelieveable....

Mouse wise I use a Trust Gamer GM-4600. Its a rebranded OCZ Equaliser (you can even use the ocz driver and software ) and costs less than £15. Has a triple fire button (good for the pistol in tf2 ) and a sensitivity adjustment button that does something like 400 - 800 - 1200 - 1600 - 2000 dpi. I really like it .

You can actually get the Ocz Equaliser for cheaper now, it supports 1000hz and has 2500dpi over the trust one. The OCZ dominatrix is a G5/G9 competitor, but costs less than £25. Note it only supports 500hz usb though if that matters to you. Im thinking I may get one to see what its like. At that price it can be a spare mouse tbh if i dont like it. The Trust GM4800 is their version of the G9 and supports 1000hz, but comes in at nearly £35, so not much of a saving over the real deal. They also do a basic gaming mouse in both Optical and Laser varieties for less than £15.

As you can tell i took a while to decide on my mouse .

For bragging rights tho it has to be THIS!!!

Bragging rights granted . Do you have that thang and how does it work?

Coolness

Nah I dont...just read a bit about it .

Basically it reads your EEG (electro encephalographic) patterns as you think about certain actions. You then tell it what action you were thinking of and assign it a function.

It takes a long time to learn, but when it has you essentially react at the speed of your thoughts.

It does have downsides at the moment, it looks ridiculous, its a big bulky and the learning curve is slow, but if you take this as the first step along a path I reckon its VERY interesting.

Look how rubbish speech recognition was when first released, and look at how well it can be implemented now. With years of development you could be looking at the keyboard and mouse of the future .

EDIT: More info here.

thinks/give me a blowjob

thinks/give me a blowjob

(breaks into mild sweat)

thinks/GIVE ME A BLOWJOB

(sweat pouring down face, teeth grinding)

THINKS/GIVE ME A... *pop* head asplode