I need to buy a laptop since I'm about to enter university. I will have to live in a different city, so I won't get to play Sims on my desktop. I would love to have a laptop that could run TS2, even if just with few expansions, but I don't really know what I should expect? Any ideas as for what to look for, and what to expect in terms of performance and amount of EPs and CC?

I can give you an example of mine. I travel a lot, so I only have a laptop and I play Sims 2 on it with about 1.5GB in Downloads. It is about 5 years old and has Intel Core i7-3840QM CPU @ 2.8 Ghz, 16GB RAM, Windows 7 - 64bit, and Nvidia Quadro K2000M with 2GB texture memory. It has a 256GB Solid State Drive, OPAL SATA3, and 2nd 500GB HDD. I use an external drive to hold extra stuff so I can keep a decent amount of space on them. It was pretty good when I bought it, nothing special now, but it works well with Ultimate Collection installed before the one that always calls Origin, so mine does not.

anything not ancient (like early CoreDuo with some old GPU) will do fine; if you do not play extensively new games (newer than 2014) in practice even typical consumer "potato" will do fine - though there is ofc a problem of the users' comfort and quality build.

(Older) Dell Inspirons are problematical - not sure the latest versions are up to snuff, but I burned out an Inspiron 15xx playing Sims2 (integrated chipset overheated and blew out the motherboard). So it's probably not worth your while to go secondhand unless you know exactly what you're getting.

Well i have been playing The Sims games on a laptop since 2012. I have never had a very high-end laptop and i can tell you TS2 always ran very goof.Currently i have mine which is like 5 years old. Nvidia 840M-2gb vram, I5 processor, 6gb of ram. and the game run amazing loading times are very short and i have no problems(yet, hopefully none). My download folder is about 4.5gb(and growing everyday). I have the UC installed and all the settings are on high. And my hood at the moment has a shopping district, downtown, all the vacation locations and a university. Overall amazing performance

*chuckles* I'm in danger!