Suggestions for a new laptop

Ciao!

I'm in the market for a new laptop, hoping to take advantage of these post-christmas sales + the lowered prices because of the economy. But my knowledge of laptops is well.... none. I've used a few and couple of my roommates have them but I've always been a strictly desktop person.

Basically I'm not looking for anything flashy, 500-800$ would be my ideal price. What I want is basically is a windows machine, 14-15" screen (14 ideal, but not necessary), fairly small, but not like paper thin and a decent batteries life (3h +) that can do word processing (school), internet browsing, maybe play a few movies & music..... and tbh that is about it. My desktop i use for any gaming or heavy duty movie/music processing so this machine is simply something to take to class & the library....ect.

And yes, likely I could get a machine for like 300$ that would do all of that, but I'm not looking for the cheapest one I can get. Anything with in the range is about the quality I'm looking for, I'm just looking for some advice as to what a good one in that range is. I see alot of HP, Dell, Asus & one or two sony when browsing a site like future shop but really the specs look basically the same on most of them so I got no clue.

any help is appreciated.


ps: I'm in Canada if that makes any difference as to the price/availability.