New laptop

after having my current laptop for going on 5 years now. i feel its time i upgraded

just looking for a few pointers really, what brands/models are worth researching etc. looking around the £300-£500 range.

also, if anybody knows of any "trade in" deals out there currently that i could factor in then that would be great

thanks everyone!

My personal shortlist would be:
HP
Samsung
Dell

Specific models would depend on what you want to do with it etc.

BTW, why do you feel it's time to upgrade? Barring hardware failure & dependant on original spec a 5 y/o lappy should have a couple of years left yet...

i was wanting to go with hp anyway as my original laptop is hp and it hasn't let me down yet.

theres a couple of reasons really. first is that the fans have become annoyingly loud and i fear that the laptop could be on its way out.

im in my final year of uni and dont want to be loosing important dissertation work etc especially if my old laptop decides its had enough one day.

and finally, its running vista premium with only 1gb of ram, so it was pretty slow when i first bought it, never mind now!

Sounds like a can of compressed air to blow the dust out might ease the fan/cooling situation but the reliability requirement for last year of Uni means a newer model might be wise... Vista on 1GB is never pretty... Typing this from a netbook with 1GB but that's running Linux so it runs pretty snappy!

Here's a link to some HP stuff. The mid priced ones look good. http://h40059.www4.hp.com/uk/homelap...dex.php?sort=l

BTW, don't forget www.osalt.com when you're loading it up with software...