I'm buying a new laptop with a max budget of £550. The laptop will be used for simple tasks like word processing. It will have alot of music and photos on it too.

The thing i want is a fast laptop, i have an external hard drive so i'm not too fussed about the size of its hard drive.

Currently the sony vaio n31M/W is at the top of the list but i have feeling i might be paying for the brand name.

Any help appreciated on wht to look for and where to look
Cheers

Acer ftw

after alot of looking around i ended up getting an acer. Not the best in daylight (in the back garden) and the after 2 years the battery now only lasts about 45 minutes from the original 2 hours, but apart from that it was a great buy at the time as it came with 100 gig HD and a pci graphics card for games.

You can't go wrong with a dell.

Pat...

I have had an Acer for homne use for about 2 years - no pobs. I got an email from Amazon to day with links to special offers on Acer laptops... incl. one for £320! You would probably need some extra RAM (I can recommend www.crucial.com) but there is probably an Acer laptop with the spec you want for less than a Sony.

Also, if you look at Dell: unless they've changed things recently the standard warranty included in the headline price of a PC is only 3 months, so make sure you price like for like.

until the dell goes wrong

Look at Tesco - no i'm not joking, the laptops they do are good value, then look what you can get from ebuyer.

What you'll notice is they all pretty much look the same - there are only a few people making laptop cases / chassis once you get away from Sony / IBM etc.

thought i should add some more detail.

Dell have a bad rep for when things go wrong. I didn't believe this until my brothers laptop broke. He ended up in a comedy conversation. He'd bought top of the range with the best warranty they had. When he tried to say "got a problem with the case, its cracked" they said, "its plastic, its not essential therefore not covered". He then asked if he could therefore remove all the plastic from the outside of the laptop. They replied "oh course not sir, you'd expose the innards the plastic covers". He therefore pointed out its essential ......... circular conversation.

Anyway, the crack wasn't that bad, he was only getting it fixed cause he was going to give me the laptop (he's a nice brother). About a month latter the thing emitted a puff of smoke and died (i was slow picking it up). Dell decided that as it was catastrophic failure of multiple components it wasn't covered in the warranty - if just one thing had died it would be.

Now brother is rather fuming here. Took it to work - they use lots of dell kit and have a business relationship direct with dell. Tech's there looked at it and said .... sorry, its dead. If it was one of our dell's we'd be ok. Cause we have a business warranty we'd just send it back and it would be replaced, consumer warranty forget it.

Me - i've got a samsung from tesco's. I'm happy after 4 months, lad in the office had his 8 and he's still happy.

Acer at Asda £275.00

acer certainly take some beating, my 2 daughters both have acer laptops, one about 3 years old the other about 2 (the laptops not the girls b4 some smarta*se gets in there!) the older machine had a harddrive problem during the last month of warranty, was sorted out no probs (did take about 3 weeks tho' & they replaced the 30Gb hd with a 40Gb at no cost.
Bought from laptopsdirect who always seem to have competitive prices & service is good.

Toys R Us arn't too bad if they are doing Medions.

I bought one for the in law last week. Toshiba L10X (2Gb version) from PC World.

I don't like the Advent ones too much, the case feels a bit to flexible and a friend across the road broke her display just by trying to close it from one corner rather than the center.

acer also gets my vote, very impressed with mine

I've had a toshiba m40 for two years and its the best I've ever had!

My kids Dell went down and the CS was a joke. In the end I ended up taking it apart myself and mending it, it turned out to be a loose RAM Socket... a little adjustery got it working ok.

FWIW - for the money you can get a "FAST" Laptop you could get a superfast PC. No Laptop is fast compared to the equivalent processor in a PC. Laptops are only good for one thing - being portable. If you can manage at all with a PC - do so!!!

Steve

Bargain, this gets my vote !

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/ProductInfo.aspx?ProductID=22016

Only 3 manufacturers I tell clients to avoid are Dell, Acer and Packard-Hell.

Toshiba ---- always have made good laptops.
Fujitsu-Siemens ----- very reliable good VFM
Sony --- very good but you pay for the branding
Lenovo --- very good but again you pay for the branding.

work uses lots of Tosh (in fact i think thats all we use). Seem ok to me.

Recommend Acer from experience - PCworld has this - Acer 5633. On line price is good saving and double airmiles!

[Edited on 7/9/07 by geoff shep]