Hi Bill, well the $300-$400 range for a laptop is pretty much at the bare bones absolute bottom end of the price spectrum, and there is probably not going to be a whole lot of variation between different models at that range.

Those low end computers will actually run MoI but they will be fairly limited in computing power compared to a desktop machine and so you'll be somewhat limited to low or medium complexity type models, you should not expect to be able to handle higher complexity models on it.

One thing to look at is what graphics card is powering the machine - any graphics system from nVidia or ATI will be preferable to the "integrated" Intel one, but you'll probably only find the integrated graphics at that low end. MoI can still run on the Intel integrated graphics, it's just generally lower horsepower.

But also the Intel integrated graphics have improved quite a bit in recent generations, so if you get one that is using a somewhat newer generation of it then that can help. You can look at the chart here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA - try to avoid about the older half of those chips.

The other thing that can help in general is to get enough system RAM, if you have a choice between one with 1GB of RAM and 2GB of RAM for not much extra, that can be a big help just in general since operating systems these days tend to consume a lot of memory themselves.

- Michael