I'm on a quest. I want a good gaming laptop for a small price.
I know, I know; laptops can't be used to play games. But here's the thing: I only play old games and I'm sure laptops of today can handle that. The newest game I currently playing is Minecraft for God's sake.

Why do I want a laptop if I have a desktop? Mobility.
Also. I don't need that powerhouse for what I'm doing.

My only demands: 1080p monitor, 250+ GB storage, preferably SSD.
HDMI output.

I do all my Pc gaming on a laptop.
If your budget is quite tight I would look at a refurbished laptop. That's what mine was. And other than the hard drive dying (which was fixed under warranty) it's been great.
Make sure you get one with some kind of guarantee though incase anything does go wrong with it.

The refurbished ones are usually just returns or cancelled orders so most of them haven't even been owned as such.

There is no such thing .

I know. 'least I tried.

What's your budget? What's your preferred size / weight (do you want a lightweight laptop or is a 15.6" screen 3kg laptop fine)?

Edit: Checking Newegg, looks like laptops with 1920x1080 displays start at around $600 (unless you buy refurbished). But don't expect an SSD at this price.

Edit 2: This looks pretty good at this price range, at least spec-wise.

I think almost any cheapo laptop will do. Preferably one with either (cheapo) NVidia or AMD graphics, but Intel Graphics will do as well. The 1920x1080 resolution might mean though you may have to pay a bit more, cheaper laptops usually have something like 1280x720, 1366x768 or 1600x900. I actually like the 1366x768 resolution because it fits great for older 1024x768 games, as the vertical resolution is the same.

I guess Minecraft can be quite CPU (not GPU) intensive depending on what kind of world you are running on it at a time, but since I see one kid playing it comfortably on a 5 year old laptop that was cheap already back then, I think any current laptop should be able to handle it fine.

Why is it that you want 1920x1080 resolution anyway? You probably won't be able to run new-ish games on that resolution anyway (but more like 1280x720 or so), and 1080 would really need at least a 17" screen to be worth it, and 17" laptops are less mobile (heavier, bigger, and doensn't necessarily fit into common-sized backpacks (I know ASUS G75VW definitely doesn't, I had to buy a special bigger laptop backpack for it, even those seemed to be hard to find. But then G75VW is a bit larger in size than many other 17" laptops, as it has that odd "cooler wing" at tha back, making it larger))). I feel 1080 is an overkill on a 15" screen, or smaller.

Also remember that normally the laptops with lower native resolution can still display 1920x1080 (full HD) if you have it connected to either an external 1080 monitor or Full HD TV with e.g. HDMI. My work laptop is like this: its native resolution with its own display is 1600x900, but it has no issues displaying 1920x1080 resolution when I have it connected to my TV (e,g, for watching FullHD movies through it).

You're telling me I've been living a lie the past 6 or so years?

ASUS ROG laptop should fill your needs.

Something you should pay attention to is the laptop's ability to remain aspect ratio. Sadly, this is not among the usual info you get, but I'm in a similar position - although I'm mainly looking for a cheap working laptop, I also want it to be able to run old games - and I've tried laptops that just didn't have this option due to their configuration and driver installations, making them useless to me in this regard. If you only want the laptop for retro gaming, it's even more essential that it can display 4:3 resolution like 800*600 or 1024*768 without stretching the image to weird proportions.

I haven't really found a better way than just trying them out in order to determine which laptops are better than others when it comes to offering the remain aspect ratio option, so far I can only say that a HP laptop I tried was the worst, while an Acer didn't pose any problems, but that may also have been incidental (dependent on other things than the brand) and could change from model to model ...

Just keep in mind that this might turn out to be even more important than the rest of the system specs. After all, what good is a retro gaming laptop if it can't correctly display the resolution of your old games?

Not sure if ASUS ROG line is necessarily needed if you intend to play mostly old games, but they are good for PC gaming, and are in various price levels nowadays. So a cheap ASUS G-series laptop might be ok, if you agree with the price. At least here the prices for G-series seem to start from 999€, though (and up).

E.g. this one:

http://www.kannettavatietokone.fi/Kannettavat/Asus/G551JM-CN061H.html

That should play also semi-new games quite comfortably, and newer games too with somewhat lowered details. Maybe Witcher 3 will be too much for it, though. :) Maybe that laptop is generally about the same speed as my older G75VW gaming laptop (not quite sure which has a faster CPU though).

Since you wanted SSD, the price doesn't include a SSD drive though (but a 1 terabyte 2.5" HDD), not sure how much the price would go up to replace it with a SSD. EDIT: Well, it says a SSD replacement would cost an extra 200-300€, depending if you want a 250GB or 500GB SSD. I'd personally keep the 1 terabyte HDD, but that's just me I guess.

Overall I am generally happy with ASUS products. I have bought one laptop (G75VW) and two tablets (old ASUS Transformer TF101 many years ago, and more recently ASUS MeMO Pad ME181C), and I've been very happy with them all. Even the TF101 is still in active use. ASUS is one of those technology companies I've grown to like and trust. I'm like you (4:3 games should be displayed in 4:3), but I recall some here even wanting to stretch all their games to "full screen", with no black bars on the sides. :)

However, are you sure it wasn't about the graphics driver versions? I've had laptops with NVidia, ATI/AMD and Intel graphics chips, and all of them have displayed older 4:3 Windows games fine in correct aspect ratio, at least after I've updated their drivers up to date. Or are there some specific mobile graphics chipsets that just won't do it, no matter what?

I originally had some graphics issues with HP ProBook 6470b (could be they were related also to aspect ratio, but I recall it had a very limited set of resolutions available at first), but after I was able to update the graphics drivers to latest ones, my problems were gone.

Updating the drivers was a bit problematic though: the graphics drivers that HP offered in their homepage were very old, and when I found newer ones from Intel's homepage, they refused to install over the HP drivers. The solution was then to uninstall the original HP drivers first, and then installing the newer Intel drivers. There was some stupid fail-safe mechanism in those drivers that wouldn't install vanilla Intel drivers over customized(?) but older HP drivers.

Now I'm playing fine e.g. KKND 2 on this HP ProBook on a 4:3 aspect ratio, no issues whatsoever.

Yes, it's a graphic driver issue, but it seems that depending on the pre-installed configurations, just re-installing a different driver may not work and it can be a real pain in the neck to fix it. I'm not saying there are laptops who can't run 4:3 games at all, I'm just saying if there's a choice between those who can do it right away and those who require you to invest a lot of time and patience into configuring them the way you need them to be, I know which one of the two I'd choose. When I had this issue with the HP laptop, people here were suggesting that I had to re-install Windows and all drivers manually, and that's something I really don't feel like doing when I buy a new laptop (if it's even possible at all, seeing that at least the cheap ones often come without a proper Windows DVD and just allow you to reset the pre-configured system).

Yeah maybe so, but then you'd need to be able to try some old 4:3 Windows games on that system first... or I am unsure if merely switching the Windows desktop resolution to a 4:3 resolution is enough to confirm it?

It may be I had a similar issue with this HP ProBook at first, but I recall it was generally about there being many common (also 4:3) resolutions missing altogether with its old HP graphics drivers. In my case, it was enough to uninstall the HP graphics drivers, and install the newest ones from Intel.

EDIT: Ok I tried it, changed the desktop resolution to 1024x768 to confirm I get black bars on the sides (and nowhere else). I guess that should be enough to confirm whether it can manage the 4:3 aspect ratio without stretching.

Yes, that's the crux of the matter. Sadly, most of the time you don't have any way to find it out before buying and trying the laptop. I'd be happy already if I could check the graphic driver options, but often stores have their own ad slideshow program locked on the screen and don't even allow you to check the desktop. :(

I would add that graphics card drivers in general for laptops can be a pain. They often don't seem to bother being updated, or the suggested ones don't work.
I currently have to force my laptop to boot up in a separate mode that accepts unsigned drivers because the up to date driver for my AMD card isn't signed properly and Windows doesn't like it... but the signed driver it wants me to use won't work with OpenGL or a lot of other things.. and it took a while to figure out how to get it working at all.
And the last laptop that I had had a laptop specific NVidia card that they didn't seem to bother supporting at all...

So just be careful what graphics card you go for or be prepared to put some effort into getting it to work / keeping it working...
I know next time I upgrade I will be paying a lot more attention to the graphics card and how well supported it is.

Not if you're using nVidia, which gets the same support as the desktop GPUs.

Maybe these days... it's been quite a while since I had my laptop that had a nVidia card (about 10 years) but they didn't then. I think I ended up having to download an unofficial third party driver if I remember correctly...
Good to know they are better these days, but I would still be careful and do some research...