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Recommendations
All you really want to know is: what kind of screen would be good for me?
So I've split up the categories of uses, and hopefully one of the categories will best describe the main uses you'll have for your notebook.
Internet, E-mail, Word Processing - The casual user would be served well even by a $700 notebook. For you, pretty much any screen will do. Obviously if you want more screen real estate, a bump in resolution might work for you, but keep in mind that increased resolution means text is going to be smaller. And while Windows will let you scale up text size to make it more legible, it almost never looks very good. This becomes entirely personal preference, though I'd suggest a matte screen over a glossy. Other than that, knock yourself out.
Gaming - I cannot for the life of me understand why widescreen notebooks are the default for gaming now, but there you go. I personally would still recommend a standard aspect ratio over widescreen, but barring that, you're going to want to keep your screen resolution on the lower side. Whatever the lowest resolution available for your chosen screen size is, you're going to want it. Games look best when running at the native resolution of the screen. Note, too, that your screen likely won't get smaller than 14", since thin-and-light and ultraportable notebooks seldom have the hardware required to properly run games. A glossy screen would be ideal, but that's going to be a personal preference.
Movies - You want a widescreen notebook, and probably one of the lower resolutions. Since most movies today come out in widescreen aspect ratio, this will be ideal for you. Also keep in mind that if you're going to be watching movies more on the road (or in the air), you'll want a smaller screen so your notebook takes up less real estate. If you're watching them at home (or in a dorm room setting, for example), you'll want a larger screen, possibly even a 17". For either situation, a glossy screen isn't just ideal, it's almost essential.
Visual Multimedia - For digital video editing and image manipulation, I've found a glossy screen to be ideal. You'll also want one of the larger screens and, quite frankly, high resolution. My 15.4" widescreen is 1280x800 (WXGA) and frankly, just doesn't cut it for Adobe After Effects, and barely does for Premiere Pro. You want as much screen real estate as you can get, so you're going to want to pay extra for a higher resolution screen. You'll also want a widescreen, especially the video geeks. Your notebook is NOT going to be cheap, considering you're going to need a lot of RAM, a decent speed hard disk, and a powerful processor backing up that screen. The only brands I can think of that make notebooks that would be suited for this that clock in at under $1,500 are HP, Compaq, and Gateway (especially Gateway), but their screen resolutions are all going to be low (generally WXGA or WXGA+). So if you're on a budget doing this, you may want to get an inexpensive external monitor.
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