Hi,
I'm not sure if this is the right place but I thought I would just give it a shot. I am looking to buy a new laptop primarily for the sims 3 my old laptop is 4yrs old and about to give out on me. I would like some help from my knowledgeable friends here at the forum . I am not looking to spend more than $600 so those Alienware suggestions are going to fall on deaf ears. Please help? Thanks

Don't buy a laptop build your own pc you can easily build one for like 800 quid that'll be able to play games like bf3 and cr2 at full 1080p at highest settings with dx11

If you're not willing to spend more than $600, you would have a very hard time finding anything not using an integrated graphics card or a decent processor. You would probably have some choppy gameplay on the low-medium settings at the most. If you build your own PC, I would say you could get an i7, decent RAM (6-12GB), 500GB HD (or 120GB SSD), and an Nvidia graphics card, all for around $700. You could probably build those specs but using an i5 for $600, but if you really don't want to build your own PC, you can get a really good Asus with an i7 for around $800, which will probably be able to play The Sims 4 2-3 years from now. The computers under $600 are budget computers built for web-browsing and everyday use, definitely not for gaming. The Sims 3 is a CPU-intensive application and your computer will struggle to play it on the lowest settings. Basically building your own PC for $600 will really play the most graphically intensive games (ArmA II, Battlefield 3, Skyrim) with ease.

Thank you guys for your suggestions. Building a PC sounds like a big project for me but I have a friend that can help . I will definitely adjust my budget I didn't think about the graphics card I was focused on power to run the game but not what will run it. Thank you again

Good to hear that, it is fairly easy, as there should be many websites that should help you start building one. You should very easily be able to buy parts for it too, but I myself have never built a PC before. I would recommend an Nvidia graphics card (GeForce GT 640 for maybe $100) and an Intel Core i7 for about $300, and 8GB 1600MHz RAM for about $50-60 for starters, you would need a hard drive, tower case, motherboard, DVD drive, a fan, and many other components, but I would see the grand price to be $800. But you could go lower seeing that a machine with those specs would definitely handle The Sims 3 at max and many other games.