Best PC laptop for modding?

[Kit Fisto]

I'm looking to purchase an older PC laptop so I can mod SWBF.
I've learned that Macs are moving away from 32 bit support, something that all the games I play use, thus I've decided to purchase a dedicated PC laptop to play my games (and so I can play SWBFII online through the GOG servers).
That being said I would love your help in figuring out the best one for my purposes.

The things I want to use this gaming laptop for are as follows:
1) Playing SWBFI and II at maximum graphics with no frame drop.
2) Modding SWBFI and II (mostly SWBFI though).
3) I'd like enough power to play games from about 5 years ago, like The Force Unleashed 1 and 2, Skyrim and Mad Max.

Now I don't have enough money to buy an alienware $1000 computer, I'm more looking for something ideally under $500 from a few years back. eBay will be my friend I expect.

Any help is appreciated! The most important thing is playing and modding SWBFI and II of course.

[Led]

I think any computer will work, but the catch is that you won't know that ZeroEdit will work ahead of time.

[LitFam]

There is another catch if your going deep into modding like importing custom stuff in the game. You won't know whether ZETools would work. Some computers reject python.

[Led]

Some computers reject python.

I honestly find that hard to believe, but I understand that ZEtools can be finicky.

[SleepKiller]

The playing and modding SWBF is a very low requirement. They're old and not very GPU intensive. I would imagine pretty much any integrated or dedicated GPU from the past few years to do both with flying colours. The requirement of running the other games sets your bar a bit higher.

Intel's recent integrated GPUs can probably do it but go back too far and they definitely won't be able to, at least not while giving a reasonable frame rate in some of them. I'm defining reasonable here as "stays steady at somewhere above 30FPS". So you'll preferably want to get a laptop with a mid-high level dedicated GPU.

Keep an eye out on what memory type the GPU has, if it's DDR3 it's possibly a low-level one and you should keep looking. If it's GDDR5 it may be worth investigating further.

As a starting point nvidia say's the GTX 760M from a few years back can play Skyrim at 1080p/30+FPS at Med/High settings. If that sounds acceptable it could serve as a starting point for your search.

Obviously once you've found a laptop in your price range that seems to fit your requirements I would suggest doing some research to see if you can find benchmarks for it playing one of the games you like.

[LitFam]

I honestly find that hard to believe, but I understand that ZEtools can be finicky.

Really I thought some windows computers reject python no 

[AnthonyBF2]

I've used SWBF 1 & 2 mod tools on a Dell laptop with a 64mb video card. You'll be fine for specifically modding.

[Kit Fisto]

Thanks for all the suggestions!

I think any computer will work, but the catch is that you won't know that ZeroEdit will work ahead of time.

Anything specific I should watch out for that we know the mod tools won't work on?

[Dark_Phantom]

You will probably have issues with Nvidia mobile graphics cards, just like the ones in desktops.

[SleepKiller]

I've used a Nvidia card (one of these with a custom vendor cooler for those curious) for the past three years and never had a GPU related issue (that I can remember) when running Zero Editor . So I would be inclined to instead say that with you might have issues rather than probably having them.

Although a disclaimer about possible Survivorship bias is needed from me here.

[Dark_Phantom]

Mine had the issue - I'm able to run ZE in a Virtual Box VM though, so that is a possible route, and I know there are a few solutions too here and at GT.