Jon

I generally find laptops are over-priced junk when it comes to EVERYTHING. If a laptop has Intel HD 4000 graphics chip, is it safe to assume it has everything else it needs?

Yes, "hit and miss" is exactly why I posted. One more detail... It will be running the kickstarter version of leadwerks on Linux. So, dual booting. However, the using that version should be able to milk a bit more power out of it. So yeah, running "at all" is prioraty here. If it runs slowly, that's hardly an issue for now. I fully agree that tower beats laptop in every way imaginable more than most people can even imagine. However, without going into too much detail, it needs to be a laptop. It's just one of those situations. Also, not buying the laptop yet. Just getting a sense of the market. The purchase will be made before Christmas.

I'm trying to get away with bare-bones minimum here. First, I live in South Australia if that changes anything. (I do most of my computer shopping at MSY a.k.a. DIY computers.) This is for a 10 year old kid who's started learning Lua in a basic Lua compiler in the hopes of getting a Linux laptop with Leadwerks for Christmas. The laptop catalogue I was looking through was this one. http://www.msy.com.au/Parts/notebook.pdf If I were to buy a $300 laptop, would that be powerful enough to engage him until he's ready to run it on something massive? Or would even performing the most basic and simplest of tasks take a week? Not looking for something super fast, but I don't want features to fail to run at all because of hardware failure. Could someone give me a sense of how much bang for my buck each amount of bucks will get me?