Please help me pick a laptop.

[MrBread]

1. What is your budget?

£700 - £850

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?

~15-16"

3. What screen resolution do you want?

At least 1600 x 900

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?

Leaning towards desktop replacement (but I will still need to carry it to Uni)

5. How much battery life do you need?

Not much on an issue, 2-3 hours would be fine

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)?

To play Source games at a high setting capably and the odd newer game (Somewhere in the nvidia 425m- AMD 5650 range)

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo / Video editing,watching movies, Etc.)

Browsing the internet, programming and other general office tasks

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?

500GB would be plenty.

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.

www.amazon.co.uk
www.ebuyer.co.uk
www.scan.co.uk
(any manufacturer's website)

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop?

At least 2 years, hopefully more

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ?

DVD ROM

12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons.

I was erring towards a Sony vaio or an Asus. I have anecdotally heard of bad stories regarding Dell and HP.

13. What country do you live in?

UK

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed.

After some research, I had been looking at a customized Sony Vaio (i5,4Gb of RAM, 425m GPU and 500Gb HDD), but I am still unsure and would really appreciate some advice as this will be my first laptop. A laptop that would be able to run Ubuntu without too much hassle would be a huge plus.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

 

[Maziar]

After a long search,I managed to find a decent notebook in your price range
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/237234
It's got 5650M which is a good mid-range mobile card.

 

[MrBread]

Thank you very much for the reply, Maziar. It looks like a good spec for the money and it is certainly a contender for me. The only potential problem I see with that model is that slightly lower screen resolution than I was looking for, I will see if I can get a similar model with a larger screen. Again, thank you for you time.

 

[Maziar]

I don't think you can find higher resolution models(with a GPU like 5650M).I know 1366x768 is not the best resolution on laptops but it's quite common for most 15" notebooks.