best F2P games

Firefall is still in beta but keep it on your radar. I've had a lot of fun with it.

Team Fortress 2 is the best F2P game ever made.

I've heard great things about Spiral Knights. I had a bit of fun with Global Agenda and APB.

Tera just went F2P and has a great combat system, from what I hear.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is enjoyed by a lot of people. It's certainly one of the prettiest F2P games. I thought it was too close to WOW, which I already didn't like. If I had wanted to play WOW, I'd have played WOW!

Load up your Steam client and hit Games > Free to Play and do some browsing.

Really though, Team Fortess 2, yo. I bought it on 360 and spent 140 hours on it. I bought it again on PC and spent another 50 hours on it before Steam started tracking play time, then another 80 hours since. When it went F2P it didn't change the game, it just brought in more players and very optional alternative weapons. It's F2P done perfectly. It's a retail game with purchases that do not give anyone an advantage over anyone else. It also does not do any of the standard time-punishment garbage that infects a lot of F2P titles. Also, once you make you first purchase you become a paid player forever. If you spend more than a couple hours in it, spend a $1 and turn your account in to a Premium version.

The first step is to install Steam then.

http://store.steampowered.com/

Browse the F2P options. Then wait for a Steam sale. If they stick to their schedule of the last couple years, Easter will be the next big week-long sale. Steam also runs weekend and mid-week sales. For example, Counterstrike and Borderlands are 50% off right now. You just missed Witcher 2 and Alan Wake at 50-75% off as the midweek sale. If you have Twitter follow @steam_games to know about new releases and sales without checking your Steam client every day. In general, and with enough patience, you can get every game that you want within 6 months of release for less than $20 and usually less than $15. Being quite behind, you'll find tons of stuff that you'll want to play for $5 in the Easter sale.

https://www.humblebundle.com/

Go to the Humble Bundle site and give then your email address. The only thing they use it for is to notify you of new bundles every two months or so. In a Humble Bundle you can pick up a group of 5-8 great quality indie games for about $6. It is a fantastic way to experience what the indies are doing with lower-budget gaming, and grow your Steam library at the same time. Some of the most interesting PC gaming is coming out of the indie space, and the highest quality stuff tends to end up in a Humble Bundle.

Within 6 months you'll have spent about $100 total between these two services and have more games to play than you can find time for.

What laptop did you order? I want to check out what video chipset it's running.

The GT 650M looks to be a respectable chipset. It looks a bit faster than the AMD A10-4600m that I played with a couple months ago, which gave very respectable 720p performance. I wouldn't expect full 1080p gaming out of the 650M, but it will likely give you a pleasant 1600x900 with FXAA. Stretched to 1080p, you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference between that slightly lower resolution and native 1080p, all with a 30% savings in rendering requirements.

It will do good for ya. Solid choice.