Buying Advice for a new laptop

Looking for a new one as my current Asus Travelmate of 3 years has seen better days.

It's an intel centrino on 2gig ram still on XP lol

I'm open to any advice on what's a decent spec or make.

It's mainly for work but it would be nice to put some games on it for when I'm away or have some spare time etc so a half decent above average GPU would be good.

Don't want it to be massive, it needs to be portable but not too small so you can't see anything on the screen
Good Wireless is also important.
DVD Re Writer etc
Long batter life
Window 7 + Microsoft Office is a bonus but not worth paying of the odds for.

I noticed when I got this laptop it was just full of apps so took ages to boot, I got it from laptops direct so open to any advise or recommended vendors.

In terms of budget, I suppose £500-£700
I could spend more if I had to or if there was a deal out there too good to be true.

Cheers

Hmm its always worth checking the Dell outlet. Also keep an eye on www.hotukdeals.co.uk

Finally we purchase a fair few machines from www.europc.co.uk for work. I'm not sure if its allowed so would need to check with mod but I can supply you with the details for my account manager there. I now never bother to build pc's for friends and family. Just pass them onto euro and they handle it for me!

I would look at this Mesh notebook as it is the cheapest one I have seen with the Mobility Radeon HD4650 DDR3:

http://www.meshcomputers.com/Default..._CAMPAIGN=box6

This is the same notebook without an OS:

http://www.meshcomputers.com/Default..._CAMPAIGN=box6

This is a faster version of the notebook:

http://www.meshcomputers.com/Default..._CAMPAIGN=box7

This Dell has the Mobility Radeon HD5650 but is a 17" notebook:

http://configure.euro.dell.com/dells...75883824506127

This Alienware notebook is also worth a look although it is just outside your budget:

http://configure.euro.dell.com/dells...ca69cdc172c161

I've purchased stuff from europc before for work but their recent (last year or so) implimentation of no prices on their website has started to annoy me, especially since you can sort on price but yet it gives no price!
Key thing is: what size do you need as that dictates price. IE >= 15.6" is the cheaper, bulky end
That plus, what type of game, ie crysis or solitaire

Cheers guys really useful stuff there.
I think I'm looking for the sweet spot on the screen size
In terms of games the odd MMO perhaps along with FPS but wouldn't expect to max out the frame rate
Just something at a playable standard

i have a dell studio 1555, and i think its not too bad, i got it for about 530 sterling, but some users have said that a few options *cough* back lit keyboard *cough* are prone to problems, you may want to try looking on ebay, you can easily put what you want it to find.

have you thought of maybe going for cheap laptop, and then decking it out?

some of the new studios are looking pretty well specced out for the price. not seen them released yet but the new toshiba l500's are looking good too, although they are a bit pricey they're supposed to be one of the most reliable manufactuers about

Thanks will look into the Dell and Toshiba

Not really thought about decking out a low speced laptop, for ease of use I'd rather by a current model and just go with it.

The notebooks I have listed will run any reasonably modern FPS game at decent settings AFAIK.

On the ATI side any graphics card under the Mobility Radeon HD4650 DDR3 and HD5650 DDR3 are not really that great TBH.

Graphics cards are very hard to upgrade as opposed to the others parts like the CPU usually.