some basic points...
one way to check for bluetooth is to see in the device manager.
also some thots:
if raw power is wot you are looking for (DTRs), nothing can beat the P4s! but in case of power consumptions they are the biggest suckers and the current generation of AMDs are no better. but amd is improving on the new turions. so if battery life is wot is imp for you nothing can beat the Pentium-M processors. but i'd say from my personal experience P4 beats all processors in the gaming arena. i am using my laptop for an year now and the only sore point in this laptop is the ati radeon igp345m. but nevertheless its a great laptop and still very much powerful wid its 2.8ghz Moblie P4 CPU. i'm a casual gamer anyway. but i can run NFS UG2 wid average setting @ 800x600. thats pretty decent. btw i dun intend to play doom3 on this laptop!!! if you want a DTR (desktop replacemnt) i'd suggest the following minimum config:
P4 3.0ghz upwards, 512mb ddr(2) ram, 60+ gb hdd, nvidia 6200 go upwards or ati mobility 9700 or x200 upwards. other parts depend on ur requitements (for eg a combo/dvd rw, bluetooth, screen size etc.)
that should be the minimum you should be looking for. over and above is ur choice. i must say that the ati radeon mobility 9700 is a chip wid a hell lot of potential!
one thing i wish to say is that i see absolutely no use of wi-fi presently here in india unless of corz if ur company provides it! rite now the wifi access costs are alarmingly high here and unfortunately not everywhere u find wifi hotspots. so i'd say not to go in for wifi cards if possisble. i've seen many models now that feature only the pentium-m cpu wid out the intel pro wireless card. i'd recommand that (so the model is essentially not marketted as a centrino). you anyway have a mini-pci slot and this card can be plugged in anytime. this comes in response to intel's latest addition of some feature to its 2200 series wifi cards thru a driver and software update. however the older 2100 series cards are not supported! (dun ask me how or why, you can find it out urself if you do a bit of searching on the net). thus at the end of the day the person who has the 2100 series card is a loser while a 2200 series owner is benifitted free of cost. so it pays to wait and get things when you really feel the need.
bluetooth cellphone users should definitely go in for a built in bluetooth module. that saves them a lot of hassles, as i am facing now. also make sure you have a good audio chipset onboard (dun expect a 5.1 channel soundcard but at least a faithful audio production chipset)
the new pentium-m 780 is out and it is supposed to be a killer performer. but as usual its price is very high. its not yet launched here i guess (anyway if you are adventerous enough you can pin-mod ur pentium-m!!!)
also one important thing for gaming is the native resolution of the screen. as someone pointed it out the native res and gaming res need to match. consider this: the tft lcd has a native res of 19xx X 12xx and the gpu is an ati radeon 9100igp or of the same class. then is a perfect mismatch! the screen wont show anything fullscreen clearly other than the native res and the gpu (or igp) here is not powerful enough to run the game in the lcd's native res. so one needs to be careful about this!
last but not the least is the warranty thingy! unlike desktops where warranty is not a big concern (unless of corz if you are extremely numbwit or a hardware freak who fiddles tooo much wid hardware), for a laptop this aspect is very important. since laptops are basically mobile devices they go thru lotsa hardships and are prone to go to service centers. so i'd be wise to check out the after sales support and serivce of the company. in the quest to save some money you may have to shell out much more for service afterwards in case of a bad or a very far away serivce centre! i think these are the basic points anyone should consider before buying a laptop.
