New Laptop, around £500-600, help needed!

Dell makes good laptops and they're priced pretty well. Laptops unlike PCs are expensive to upgrade so you're best off getting it the way you want it set up, e.g., the size hdd you want, RAM, etc. First you need to decide if you want a 14", 15.4", or 17". You can save some money going with AMD but Intel is probably the better CPU. With a rather tight budget I'd go with an AMD dual core so I have more money to put into other things, at least a 160GB hdd, DVD-R, 2GB of memory, and a better video card. If you know what you're doing with desktops, laptops really aren't fundamentally different when it comes to CPU, RAM, video card and performance. Weight and battery life is important if you'll be using the battery a lot and taking it with you a lot, e.g., my wife keeps her laptop in the kitchen and plugged in most of the time, usually just take it on vacation and plug it in, so weight and battery life isn't an issue.