I need some recommendations

[Brackstone17]

I'm in the market for a new laptop. I want one that will be able to reasonably play "recent" games with some degree of graphical quality. I'm not looking to run Crysis on high or anything, but I am wanting to be able to run something like Amnesia or Call of Pripyat. The problem is that I don't know too much about computers, so some help or recommendations would be nice. Even just recommendations regarding what type of video card and processor would be of great assistance. And if you want to tell me that running either of the games I listed on a laptop is insanity, then go ahead and do that since I just plain don't know better.

Of course, if you can suggest some good computer games, that would be great too.

[BeardedHoplite]

Oh, Brackstone, you made me dig out my laptop box.
Anyway, I scored an Acer Aspire 5532 series last June for 350 USD at BestBuy. It's not a bad little computer, there's enough RAM to play almost any game on the market. But if you want the truly modern stuff, you'll need to upgrade the graphics card.
I can run pretty much anything from the last two years pretty. The original STALKER ran better than I thought. Although I'm not sure about Call of Pripyat.
If you're into strategy games, I can't recommend Darkest Hour enough. Plus you probably could run it from a DoS computer.