Which Laptop?

If you had somewhere up to £500 to spend on a laptop, which one would you buy and why? I'm looking to get a new one but there are so many, I'm not sure which would be a good one to go for... Any help/advice would be much appreciated

I bought my HP Pavilion Entertainment laptop for about £500 in 2008. So far, I've found it to be excellent. Reliable, pretty much never crashes, nice design, good graphics card (so good for playing games, watching films, etc.). The only repair it has needed doing to it (which, because I'm lazy, I still haven't done yet) is fix the disk drive, which probably broke through my carelessness anyway. In terms of hardware though, no problems at all.

I would definitely recommend it if you want a run of the mill laptop for all the usual stuff -- internet, word processing, entertainment capabilities, etc. You can probably get it for less than £500 now.

I have a Packard Bell - PACKARD BELL EasyNote TM97-GN-030UK Laptop (Curry's ref)

It's really good and fast. Has a lot of memory and downloads anything really fast! We bought it for £550 in December last year and to see it reduced to just over £300 is actually a bit of a bummer. Definitely worth considering

It has a great graphics card for films and games. I play Sims on it a lot which has a lot of expansions and uses a lot of memory and life from the laptop but still runs perfectly.

I would definitely recommend it

xx

It'd either be a Dell as I've got a 'business' account with them so would prob get a deal (Also pretty reliable in my experience.) or HP because they look pretty good from the ones I've seen. Also, HP are a company I feel I could spend money with given that at the moment, they seem to be quite keen on FOSS - to a certain extent.

It would be a cold day in hell before I bought a laptop from a high street retailer, but that's just me knowing exactly what I want and knowing that they wouldn't have a clue!

My last laptop was a Dell Inspiron and it was brilliant. Only reason I had to replace it was because I cracked the screen by mistake. Although after 3 years the keyboard was starting to stop working, it overheated, wasnt so good with games... But a better memory or that could hugely help

I have a HP Pro Book which was about that price 6 months ago. I am very happy with it. The only thing that has gone wrong is the F5 button fell off after the laptop was leapt on by a very excited BSD The button still works

One thing that occurred to me is, don't be tempted to blow the whole 500 notes. Do some research into what specs you'll need for what you want to do. For example, I use a very old Pentium III laptop with 256mb of RAM for day-to-day surfing/emailing and other bread-and-butter tasks so you don't need a really powerful machine to do run of the mill stuff!