Laptop advice please...

Posting this on behalf of a friend :devilish:

He wants to spend around £1200 (incl VAT) and has bought (or is buying!) a vinyl cutter plotter, which will need to be run from the laptop. Software this is required to run will be coral draw and signcut Pro, so it needs to be windows based.
Looking for excellent graphics (for a laptop at least!), have at least 3x usb2 ports or 2xusb2 + 1xserial rs232 port. He would also like at least 512mb ram and a 60gig hdd, dvd+/- and cd rewriter, pref a large screen 15:10 ratio

Any advice/ideas greatfully received ;) :devilish:
Cheers
Iain

The Samsung X10 is suposed to be a nice laptop for around that money

For that lot with excellent graphics he's looking to spend around £1100+
I can recommend u look into either Dells 8600 (~£900) or the 9100 (~£1100)
www.dell.co.uk

Or

Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo A1630
This laptop was discussed in an earlier thread. I think the price for one of these babies is ~£1099

Have a look at the Fujitsu siemens Amilo A series. Excellent value for money laptops here http://www.nice-pc.co.uk/amilo_a_laptops.html

£1200 gets you an AMILO A1630 Athlon 64 3400+

- AMD XP-M Athlon 64 (Hammer) 3400+
- 80GB hard disk
- 1024MB DDR SDRAM
- Integrated DVD+RW combo drive
(8xDVD, 2.4xDVD+R, 2.4x DVD+RW, 24xCD,
16xCD-R,8xCD-RW)
- ATI Radeon 9700 128Mb external RAM
- 10/100 LAN Module
- 16-bit On-Board stereo sound ALC 655 V2.3
- Wireless LAN modile 802.11g
- 15.4" TFT-WXGA (widescreen) 1280x800/16M
- Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (pre-installed) operating system
- WorksSuite 2004
- Li-Lon, up to 2.5 hours battery life
- FREE 12 Months Collect and Return warranty

http://www.nice-pc.co.uk/amilo_a_163...24_dvd_rw.html

ooops same as above :o. my mate has just got this though and its very nice.

Cheers Lads - will let him know your thoughts.
Appreciated :)