If he's going to go that route, he might as well just save some money and get and AMD based chipset. My AMD e-350 is more than enough for the GOG catalog, and the whole laptop was substantially less expensive than the Intel equivalents.

Plus, Intel GPUs, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

Maybe the previous generations, but Nehalem and Sandy Bridge offer quite good performance across all models.

I honestly think the future will belong to Intel, seeing how their coming Ivy Bridge supports DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and OpenCL 1.1, among other things. PCs are going to become much like the consoles, most likely, if nVidia and AMD don't do something better to rival Intel.

The whole CPU + GPU in one place is very tempting for casual and mainstream buyers.

"Ivy Bridge is expected to bring up to 20% increase in CPU performance, and up to 30% increase in integrated GPU performance." ... and not to mention the smaller electrical power requirements.

Another important point to bring up in Intel vs AMD CPUs is that AMD will be focusing heavily on mobile cpus in the future. Their desktop CPU division in on the hot seat after the lackluster launch of Bulldozer. So it's going to be a stretch to recommend an AMD CPU for anything gaming related.

AMD is perfectly fine for what the OP is asking about and significantly less expensive.

If the OP had been asking about a gaming rig for current AA games, that would be completely different. But, even my relatively modest notebook can handle pretty much all the games on GOG for less than half the price of a comparable Intel based laptop.
You'd have a point if the express purpose wasn't to play old games. The laptop I have is about half the price of a comparable laptop and is more than fine for the games you find here. At least the ones up to about 2004 or so.

Which was my main point, why waste money on an Intel system when AMD is perfectly fine? We're not exactly talking about current generation AA games here.

Then he should go for an AMD laptop. :D

I never feel comfortable playing games on laptop. It doesn't feel right, i'm not used to it. But i don't know about OP. Beside, one of his goal is to have some fun playing games with friend. I can't speak for him, but personally i don't think it's enjoyable to play co-op / split screen game with smaller screen compared to desktop LCD / CRT.

Well i don't want a laptop to play on, we got a laptop at home that we bought a few years ago and i couldn't stand gaming on it. I rather have a dedicated computer that stands in the living room that i can hook up to our TV and play on that, its to crowded to sit 3-4 players around the laptop.

Yeah, for older GOG games, a used computer (X2, C2Duo, older stuff, etc.) could be fine and be really cheap.

For something slightly upgradeable, I'd recommend the following for $400ish:
- Sandybridge Pentium Gxxx series on Socket 1155s. They're real cheap, slightly less powerful than i3s, and the socket lets you upgrade to certain i5 models later when prices drop.
- Watch out for the hard drive prices these days, though, they're absolutely crazy.
- On the plus side, RAM is dirt cheap.
- Check out Tom's Hardware's monthly "Best graphics cards for the money" articles if the Intel HD2000 turns out to be too weak for your needs.

You can actually plug in a screen, keyboard and mouse into your laptop and play on that - it just seems like a cheaper and more accessible choice for old games, at least to me.

On my Samsung-TV i got a HDMI-port deicated for PC. You just connect a HDMI / DVI-cable. We been playing alot of games in the living room on our 55" LED-tv.

We got a laptop thats around 2 years old, and it cant hardly play anything. And it wasnt cheap either it cost around 4000 euro, buying a laptop in Sweden is pretty expensive and from my experience its just more hassle to get it to play than with my stationary

Get an x86, 2.0 GHz+ clocked CPU (Core 2 Duo, Quad?), a GeForce card made within the latest 3-4 years, a modern version of Windows (XP and onward) and you're good to go with a "GOG-friendly computer"....

GeForce is probably a bad idea, in my experience they are really, really unreliable with regards to retro gaming. There may be models that work better, but I've never in my life had so much trouble as I've had with my 9400 GT. EG was borderline unplayable without a huge amount of adjusting for the system. Blood 2 was completely unplayable and I have a feeling that DK2 would have been in the same boat.

I wouldn't bother with XP unless the OP already has a copy, we're basically 2 years out from security patches being discontinued and unless the OP has to buy a new copy, Win 7 is going to do just fine.

I had the exactly opposite experience with my GeForce cards, so....