Laptop Recommendations Please

[cguil_uk]

I am looking for a good quality reliable Laptop for under £500 Preferably one that has done well in the reviews.

Some gaming facility would be nice, but not strictly necessary, as I really want it for my hobbies of Genealogy and photography. Portability is therefore an important issue and also a large screen would be handy especially for multi-tasking. It would also be nice to be-able to play DVD films etc on it and a RW drive is important as well.

The other thing I should perhaps add is that I HATE Vista, and I prefer to use XP.

2gb RAM; Intel Celeron duel Core; 2 to 3Ghz +; Good Battery Life; under 3kg weight; optical drive - DVD Multi etc. ;

Optional - Card reader; up to 4 USB ports; Web cam

Any recommendations please?

I have also been looking at Toshiba L300, P300 & U400; Acer Aspire 5335 & 6930G - Comments please?

Requirements -

E-mail - Yes
Word Processing - Yes
Internet - Yes
Watching DVDs - Yes
Editing audio / video - No
Editing Photos etc. - Yes
Games - No
Portable - Yes

[The Underdog]

Make sure you don't get one with intergrated Intel Graphics --> there useless for pretty much any game made in the last 10 years.

[bofh1971]

X15 GT for really cheap
X60 MV 17" for the biggest screen

X55 if you want to play some decent games, I know its a bit more than your £500 budget but its really worth it on price/performance
It plays everything even GTA4

[IainK]

Welcome to the novatech forums!
I have little experience with laptops, but my brother has a dell studio 17 which seems pretty good, nice big screen, not *too* heavy, ATI3650- good for most games (Oblivion, Fallout 3, DOW2, TF2, EmpireTW etc)
They start at about £450, but i would reccomend upgrading from inbuilt (Intel 4500MHD) to the ATI3650

The cheapest model with 2gb of ram should be enough for xp, however i think dell only ship with vista, might be wrong. How urgently doytou need it because you could wait for windows 7?

[I3R0K3N7FEET]

http://forum.novatech.co.uk/showthread.php?t=9529

check the nova deals list regularly click the link

[bofh1971]

aye death9000 is right there are some great laptops on offer in clearance

try if you can to get a notebook with at least a 9600GT nvidia card in it

stretch that budget as far as it can go

the x55 build quality is also good, which is another consideration
cheap ones can be a little flimsy