Laptop for work

[PeteSmith]

I'm after a new laptop for a friend, i'm no expert on laptops so could do with a few suggestions. Ideally i would like to find a lappy with a sub £500 price tag, at least 4GB ram and 320Gb+ HDD.

It will be used for general office work (e-mail, powerpoint, Visio), general internet use, some CAD (Viewing only), mp3 playback and watching the odd DVD. Blu-Ray would be nice but not essential. A free upgrade to Win7 would be a nice to have.

I have already suggested taking a look at a Dell Inspiron, i have also seen a couple on ebuyer:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/168748
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/168748

I don't think it's going to be used on the go that often so battery life is not really a key factor.

Can anyone suggest some good deals?

[nichomach]

http://www.dabs.com/products/samsung...5-6--62D1.html ?

http://www.dabs.com/products/acer-as...-vhp-65LY.html ?

[Pob255]

At the moement laoptops for work have been driveing me potty, the reason is the 15.6" 16:9 screens so many now seem to come with, nice for watching a movie but not for actually working on.
You can spot them by the res numbers, 1366 x 768 = 16:9 , 1280 x 800 = 16:10
It doesn't sound much but it almost an inch taller, and for things like word documents height is generally better than lots of width.

A couple of things to look into are

Extended warranty, the prices can massively vary there, although they've been coming down a lot.

Graphics? while you probably don't need anything that good the intel GMA X4500 (common on many intel cpu laptops) my not cut it for your CAD

OS, some big choises here, is this going to be connected to a network? is so vista home may not work and vista business would probably be the best one to look at (even if that has issues, all vista business laptops come with the option to downgrade to xp pro, ether a seperate recovery disk or you need to make an image of the vista install then run a downgrade disk)

[vti_786]

you don't need 4gb of ram for office use, go for a cheaper option mate

[PeteSmith]

Pob, you make a good point about the screensize, my worklaptop is widescreen and i also find it's not as well suited for word processing, and also e-mail for that matter. Although i have a 24" external monitor at work so it's not such a problem when i'm in the office.

I'm sticking with the 4GB ram, with ram so cheap these days it makes sense, especially if it's running Vista or 7.