f13.net

To address the threshold question my title brings up:

1.  Yes, I need a laptop.  I am spending an entire year in Japan starting Sept. 08 and I'm obviously not going to ship a desktop there. 

That being said, I have survived on an IBM T42 through law school with a godawful Mobility Radeon 7500 integrated (I can't switch the graphics card out, or I would) 32-bit card.  I've been POed for a long time about my inability to play Battlefield 2 or Battlefield 2142, and now this TF2 shit tears it (I've played around with it on other people's comps, but although the rest of the box runs on my comp it won't run TF2).  Basically, the only gaming I do on my comp is Yahoo chess. 

My criteria:
1.  Affordable- I'm seeing there is non-put together stuff for around 1500-1600, and hoping tech-type people can use their mystic powers to recommend a good conglomeration of parts that is around that.  I'm not willing to go to $2000, but if there is a huge jump between a$1500 machine and an $1850 machine I'd consider it.

2.  Not going to be unable to run everything that comes out starting 6 or 8 months from now.

Any help is mucho appreciated.  Thanks!

EDIT:  I know nothing about technology, so advice along the lines of "Well, it depends if the switch-back core duo quantum matrix processors are more important to you than virtual pro-active tiger RAM shadowing" won't help me.

Look at the ASUS laptops with dedicated gaming GPUs.

A reasonably up-to-date list of gaming laptops with NVIDIA GPUs is here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/wtb_notebooks.html

Ooh, lot of nice stuff there.  Many thanks.