Good laptop <£500 ?

[Hicks12]

Essentially I was set on getting a Microsoft surface (the intel variant) however I have decided that this really wouldnt suite me for university work. My current laptop is a dell latitude e6400 a 14" display with integrated GPU (terrible...) intel p8400 i think.
Cant stand the slow speeds and I think the tasks I conduct are pretty cpu intensive.

Using virtual machines, coding in visual studios, web development and finally databases. Now the important part is that I always found I was running out of workspace so it needs to be around the 15" size with a high resolution. I assume an intel chip is needed as they seem to be the higher performers at this point in time.

Ideally I want to spend as little as possible but it seems hard to find something that completely screams out amazing price and performance. I know there are alot of the A6 AMDs around and I bought my dad one so I will be trying out my software on his laptop and see how it goes but id still like something better .

Aiming to get this in the next month or two, however if theres any new chips in the pipeline that speak out significant improvements please mention them, I havent really been up to speed with the developments in the laptops .

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I saw this one mentioned in another thread:

http://www.medion.com/gb/electronics...d_notebooks_20

[Hicks12]

hmm not sure how good medion laptops are but appreciate the link as they have a few there. Its a shame im struggling to find any high res screens, all are 720p which is a joke .

Going to keep looking haha.

[scaryjim]

Are you planning to lug it around to lectures? tbh your usage doesn't sound very demanding unless you're planning some epic databases or applications, it'll benefit from lots of memory and multiple cores more than a particularly epic CPU. A quad core AMD APU with 8GB of RAM should be a good fit if you can find one in your price range, and if you're not going to lug it around then a 17" might be an option?

Alternatively, if you do want to lug it around get something smaller and also take a monitor to hook up to it when you're in your room?

[Hicks12]

Yeah im planning to use it for lectures as its replacing my current uni laptop, im doing work in the university library as its open 24/7 and it has less distraction than at home, however at home ill be using my desktop as it is my 'workstation'.

My currently laptop is 14" and id ideally want 15", 17 is probably to much as seating has limited space for laptops during lectures. And yeah it probably isnt going to need some massive powerhouse however I do hope to play some games, possibly take it to some basic lans .

I think the main thing is that I want a very noticeable difference between my current laptop which has a p8600 cpu. Its a shame i cant really justify so much money, a laptop just popped up at the dell outlet and its an Inspiron 15R - 7520, i7 3612QM, 2 GB AMD Radeon HD 7730M Card and a 15" 1080p display, only £560 .

If i could avoid the 20% vat id have snapped it right up, sounds bloody awesome (its £850 on dells website!). Its hard to find decent resolutions and this just jumps to the max haha.

[Hicks12]

Gave up looking for a different laptop and decided to just keep an eye out on the dell outlet and another laptop came up which i bought (was on phone... dell outlet wasnt working in uni haha)

Inspiron 15R - 7520 (which is the Special edition)
i5 3210
8GB ram
1TB HDD
2GB 7730
1080p screen

£460 in the end, decided that the i7 wasnt worth it and id rather put that £100 towards a 128gb SSD, Plymouth uni has just refurbished their PCs and every single pc is now equip with an i5 2500k (same as mine just stock clocks lol!) and the main computing building is equip with i7 2600, and the actual computing labs are i7s aswell with dual screens so I can see myself using them now if I really need huge power while away from home, its a massive difference as before they were similar speeds to my current laptop lol.

Hopefully its a good buy, buying from dell cheapest I could get was like £700 so i think its a good saving but i will be keeping an eye out on the Outlet encase something much better comes up before this one arrives, if nothing better turns up then I will stick with it and be very happy, apparently the 1080p display is very nice and the only downside is the battery life but its still like 3 hours and hopefully I will be able to find a 9 cell for it but thats not important right now.