£650 (ex vat) to spend - which developer laptop?

[Spud1]

Hi guys,

I've been given the option of replacing my current work PC with a work laptop - since at the moment I am using my personal laptop for "mobile working", and clearly I don't want to continue doing that. I am a development manager who still gets his hands dirty with large .NET solutions, so it needs to be "developer spec" even if 50% of it's use is spread sheets/outlook.


I have been set a limit of around £650 ex-vat, but thats the only limit from my boss. On top of that I've set my own requirements.

Maximum of 14" screen, no minimum.
Support for at least 2 external monitors (could be via a dock)
minimum 3 hours "real world" battery life (so approx 6 hours quoted time)
Minimum 4gb ram
Intel CPU - preferably i7
No Acers, Dells or Asus's.

Best option at the moment is this one - HP Elitebook 8440p, which is a core i7 with 4gb of ram (cheap to add in an extra 4gb), and hits my requirements from what I can tell.

http://uk.insight.com/en-gb/producti...tops/HPYA08VYB

That's £652 ex vat on our pricing tier with insight, and this is the best spec/quality laptop that I can find.

Anyone know of any other options? I can stretch that budget a bit if needed I think, but for an easy life I want to keep it at around £650 so that this can be auto approved

Ta!

[Smudger]

Dell 14z?
If you want a dock, you probably need to look at a Lenovo T series or an HP Business-spec one. Not too sure what's available in those ranges...

[Spud1]

Sadly a dell is not an option after our IT hardware team have had endless problems with their laptops of late.

Placed the order anyway and gone for that HP Elitebook - managed to snag a dock for only £30 on ebay too which is pretty good imo Thanks for the suggestion - the 14z would have been a good choice if I had free reign...still that Elitebook should be decent