Ok ok, I don't want to start too many of these threads, but you guys are smarter than me so I have to ask:
Is this Asus a legit deal as far as a gaming laptop that will never leave my room. And I am absolutely fine with factory refurbs.
Any foreseeable problems?

If it will never leave your room, why not just get a desktop? But for a laptop, it's rock solid, heart touching. CPU is not dual core (OH NOES) but you'll live.

Did you mean quad core?

Yes I did. I was just testing you.

it costs $100 to ship my desktop and monitor to college. i can put a laptop in my travel bag for free.

Thats a lot of money to ship stuff but I'd lay odds that the vast majority of it is the case. If you're paying 700 bucks for this thing, why not pull your existing PC to bits, take the major components with you and get a new cheap boring beige box (or B3) case locally to reassemble it? It'd cost a lot less and you could probably get a new video card or something as well (which would be one less thing to carry). An Antec 300 case would set you back about 60 bucks, add 40 for shipping the monitor and that leaves you 600 bucks to buy a shithot video card with.
A laptop would be easier and would do the job but the important parts would never be able to be upgraded so it'll be the same PC forever (yes technically some can be upgraded but its more work than its worth) so you're buying tech thats already a bit too old to run modern games and will only get worse. If you don't mind that and/or aren't too confident on pulling your main PC to bits, a lappy might be a good plan.
One thing I'd suggest is loading up the Dell site and having a look through their stuff, they often have good sales on and if you can find the link to the dell outlet, you can get a fuck of a good bargain. They seem to hide the link amongst boring crap, on the australian version you have to go into the details for one of the lappys from the main page and the link is then in the left sidebar. The outlet sells cancelled orders, stuff thats been made but was never shipped or shipped to the wrong place and returned, you can't modify the systems at all but you can sometimes find a few hundred bucks off on a good bit of kit

sorry guys, i wasn't clear about this:
i have to go to school and back twice a year for the next couple of years. i need a laptop.
i checked the dell outlet, dell's weakness is video cards. anything that could legitimately run a game costs waaay more than it needs to. even on the outlet.

Okay that does make a big difference then. The best dell I could build was $800, core i3m with a radeon hd 5470
Oooh thats a potential money saver, have a look on your uni's website and do a search for Dell EPP (or just epp), my uni gives a 5-8% discount on dell gear AND you get upgraded to business level service which doesn't sound like much but its the difference between 3 hours on hold to talk to a phone monkey who doesn't know anything but their tech support script and get you to restore the system no matter what and 10 minutes on the phone with a technician who sends another technician to actually fix your problem the next day (and in my case I was 3 hours drive from the nearest dell service centre and it was STILL next day).

Well, I ordered from Dell, got myself an i5 and an ATi 5650, which if Notebook Check is to be believed, should play everything on Medium. It's also pretty much Dell's top graphics card unless you want to venture into Alienware and pay twice as much. However, after discount codes it stilll cost me £700, which would probably translate to around US$1000. So yeah, that Newegg deal is a good one, I think you should get one.

Oh yeah, good idea! I'll check it out.
it's a good mobile card, but i think the 260m in the asus beats it pretty handily, and i can get that system for $700