In lieu of the other computery thread (here) I thought I'd throw up my own, not wanting to hijack that one.

My basic computer needs just come down to a) light, b) decent battery life and c) good word processor (not doing any major graphical fiddling, just need spreadsheets etc). However I'd like it to be capable of gaming to some degree. What I'm really looking for is something that's capable of playing Good Old Games, as well as (preferably!) the likes of Torchlight II and Trine II — don't need to play Skyrim, here. It's okay if it needs to be on lower settings, I just want smooth performance.

That said I really don't want to sacrifice much in the way of battery and weight for games.

I'll be getting some assistance, so I'd say $1000 (AUD) is the top price I could conceivably spend.

Any assistance is much appreciated!

I'm not sure about Trine 2, but Torchlight 2 will run on pretty much any laptop you can find. My current Lenovo has a dual core 1.6ghz processor and it runs TL2 without any problems. I think it was only $500 or so when I bought it last year.

I'd recommend looking at a small business laptop as those are usually better quality than the ones marketed to consumers in that price range.