Summer is in, so all the kids will be out from school and their parents will be kept busy thinking up ways to keep them occupied. For the grown-up kids at heart, they will also probably be in a summer state of mind.

The advent of summer can only mean a number of things: summer trips, whether to the beach, to camp, to Granny’s house, or even abroad; summer days spent outdoors hanging out with friends; or summer days indoors hosting serious gaming parties. If the case in question for you is the first item or the third item, you would surely need a laptop to augment the summer fun.

Why is that, you may ask. If you’re going on a summer trip, you ought to bring your laptop with you so you could still communicate with your family and friends, whether through email, IM, voice chat, Myspace, Facebook and whatnot. Pictures taken during your trip are a must-share on a personal blog.

However, if you are just staying home, you can use your laptop to entertain yourself this summer. You can start by making your PC your very own home theater system, to play your music and your videos. Or you could simply log into an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars or Final Fantasy XI and spend your summer days beating up monsters. Better yet, you could organize a group of people to play with you over a network. That’s loads of fun.

The question is: what kind of laptop will best serve you this summer? You can easily search the Internet for the answer.

One all-purpose laptop that comes highly recommended is the HP Pavilion dv6500t. This laptop, with its shiny black-and-silver casing, is pretty without being showy. At 6.2 pounds, you can carry it anywhere without much difficulty. You might find yourself wishing that this baby’s screen is wider than 15.4 inches (diagonal), but the portability makes up for the screen size. Performance-wise, it isn’t bad at all. Its 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 processor, teamed up with a 2GB memory and a 120GB hard drive ensures that you will get your work done on this laptop quickly and happily. Battery life lasts approximately four hours. The one bad thing about this laptop, however, is that you may want to change from the integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 from this laptop and upgrade the graphic card if you want to have some real gaming fun.

PC World ranks the HP Pavilion dv6500t as its number one all-around laptop to date, while CNet.com has given it a score of 6.9 out of 10. It is definitely worth looking at.