I am thinking of acquiring a new laptop. Looking in the (roughly) £600-800 range.

Only must have is a dvd writer, but battery life then mobility are also desirable.

I have had a look around roughly, but does anyone have any fantastic ideas / horror stories about any particular laptop manufacturer?

I have a slight affinty for Dell, but thats cause I've used quite a few and been pretty impressed. In fact the
Inspiron 640m looks pretty cool.

A mate of mine has an Acer Aspire which he is very happy with and rants about...

Comments please?

Am now on my 2nd IBM thinkpad. Just bought 6 T40 Thinkpads for my dad's business. Superb machines although business oriented (unsurprisingly). Don't have a DVD RW though.

The T40's were about £500 - awsome deal although I did have to renew the warranties on them as I was buying old stock.

Two things:

1. Battery life is so important. Nothing more annoying than having to plug your laptop in every 1.5 hours. A laptop that can take an extra extended battery in another slot would be useful for trips.

2. Screen resolution. Something I found about late when I was looking for my own laptop. Basically XGA is not enough. You need SXGA at a minimum and i've seen laptops out with UXGA (1600x1200) but that is just going to look silly unless you have a 17" screen!

Other points:
IBM's inbuilt wireless kicks the crap out of any wireless adapter i've seen - laptop or not. I connect to anything.

Keyboard - don't forget to look at the layout. Do you mind PageUP/PageDown as a Fn button? Do you want arrow keys in a vertical line or in the familiar triangle formation?

Trackpads suck (opinion). Those trackpoints (usually placed between the G and H keys) are much nicer to use.


Dell - their x1 ultraportable is meant to be sickenly small and cool. My dad saw it when he was out in the USA and he said it was seriously smart. However it's probably not what you are looking for.

You'll need to ask somene else about laptop graphics cards etc. I haven't got a clue

Well that's a start. Pete will have some opinions too (mostly pro IBM!).

Cheers Dan,

I'll have a look at what IBM have to offer...

Graphics card is way down on my list, and to be honest I don't really need the power (my desktop still has an onboard Geforce 4MX sharing 32Mb of RAM) the worse the better as it'll improve battery life (less power hungry) / conserve any shared RAM etc...

I have mixed opinions on the touchpad vs touch-nipple, and to be fair I *can* work with either...

Thanks for the other tips though.
I found some good reviews of the Dell I mentioned previously and the screen resolution is good (1440 x 900 @ 14.1" widescreen) keyboard layout is nice (see attachment) and apparent the battery life with the standard battery is ~5hrs and ~7hrs with their super-duper-XXL battery option.

[attachmentid=167]
I know it says XPS M140 on the pic, but that and the 640m are the same beast, they just sell the XPS for a higher price.

The Dell X1 does look the business, but I'd sacrifice the ultra-mobility for an integrated DVD drive and lower price tag.

I have heard good things about the battery life of Sony Vaio laptops but most you look at just seem a bet excessively priced for what they are (admittedly the almost always look stunning though).

I always used to like Toshiba laptops but they look like they've gone downhill a bit in their mid-range level products...

Ladies and Gentlemen (and Tart)

May I present: the Underwood 'Standard' Typewriter No 5.

Price £801.99 (slightly out of your price range I know Tart but I'm sure having seen it you will be willing to stretch for this beauty.)

Features include: Manual loading paper tray, push-down keys, return bar thing that goes 'ding!', dvd writer, clackety clack sound effects programme plus optional spoiler and alloys.

But get this... no battery needed!!! This baby will keep going, and going, and going.

Join the revolution, buy an Underwood.

you jest, but http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/underwood/

I'm just way ahead of my time. Cutting edge and that.

haha sammyboy - brilliant. how the heck did you find that chris?
Ever see that one about someone cooking his breakfast off his cpu?

7 hours of battery life would be sweet as.
My friends both have toshibas. They're happy with them (cost about £450) but they are very middle range. And weigh a ton.

399 Dell offer from Ebay
http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/110298?eblast=mainbanner

Dan is right; a thinkpad T-series is the way forward.

you ibm lovers....

I went for the dell in the end.
Lovely piece of kit. Battery seems very good at the moment although I haven't properly timed it.

Course the bandits at Dell don't ship an OS cd with their systems any more, so once you reformat the whole thing you then have to ring them up to get em to send you the disk. I mean I actually paid for a copy of windows XP and now I can't put it back on my laptop.

Ubuntu Linux seems to work pretty well though... but I'd like it to dual-boot.

the silence (particularly from Pete) is deafening ;o)

Was wondering about Ubuntu.

When it brings out some "parellel" type software so you can run XP inside it (ala mac - or is that marketing bullshit?) I might then give it a go.

like virtual machining?

you do have Wine so you can run win32 programs.

Or you have it setup dual-boot with a shared data partition.
Plus the cool thing about ubuntu is that it runs off a liveCD so you can just boot it from CD and see how it works etc. without actually having to install it.

Battery life is amazing but we'll see how long it stays that way for - at the mo I get 5-6 hours out of it with the wireless networking running constantly.

yeah virtual machining in a nice slick interface. check out this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbt9upE6hpM

Windows, Mac OS and Red Hat all running simultaneously with smooth "flip cube" switching between them.