Looking to Get a New Laptop

I'm looking to invest in a new laptop for myself. My current one is getting old and it feels sluggish these days.

My budget is £600 at the very most and I'm looking for a decent laptop to last me a while. I'm not an expert on specs and such so I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations?

Thanks in advance.

I had this the other week. What's your current system like, and how long have you had it? May be something that can be sorted by a RAM upgrade.

Mine's six years old, chucked an extra 2GB of RAM in it last week and it helped it use its full processing speed better, now runs like new. Saved me about £250.

I've already upgraded it to the max amount of RAM it can take (2GB). There's nothing else I can do to upgrade it further.

Would readyboost be able to help any further? If you have Vista or 7, just plug in any usb stick and click on the readyboost icon on the pop up and you can turn flash memory into usable RAM. It's a pretty useful feature.

But to be honest RAM may not be the issue, I never find myself using more than 30% of my ram, it's more of an issue with the processor if I'm running HD videos or something. Although the new Media Player Classic that doesn't need additional codecs has fixed that.

I'd say look into a Toshiba. £600 should get you a damn good laptop, but you could go cheaper. I got my laptop last year and it has 4GB of RAM and a 2.1 GHz processor and it was only around £300. It was a launch deal with Windows 7. Make sure you get a laptop with a HDMI output, they're extremely useful.

Lol I *think* we had a similar conversation a few years back! I would say build a PC for £300/400

I need a new laptop too. Not sure whether to spend £400 which is about as much as I have, or fork out and go for a macbook for around £700

Unless you really need portability, then I would go with what JB said - can build a monster PC for about £500 at the moment or something very decent for just over the £400 mark.

Hmm,I need the portability because I use my laptop all the time at uni/library. The battery on this thing is dead to boot too.

Macbooks are good but not worth the money ( had one all through uni) something like a 13" HP around the £500 - £600 mark is decent.

One thing I'll say is that laptop/macbook batteries wont last for a long time. So you will have to keep buying new batteries when the time comes.

You can get a decent Intel I5/I7 or even AMD based laptops for that price.

What I would suggest is that You get i5/7 OR AMD, with about 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, DVD burner and separate graphics to boot. You should be able to get that for around £500.

Good laptop makers are Sony, Lenovo, Toshiba, Panasonic. My brother has an acer and its not given him trouble for the past 4 years too

Look into Asus, they're the best laptop brand out there. Sony laptops are terrible as they have very cheap parts in them and the same can be said about Mac's. At least Asus are very well known for making top quality PC components (they make almost every component) and they have excellent customer service.
If you get a Laptop with Windows 7 make sure it's got at least 4GB of ram because Win7 runs slow with less than that amount of ram and make sure it's a 64bit version.

as for portability Echoes, look for the "SU" core Netbooks not notebooks. They have decent power, basic to fairly good graphics processing (depending on the chipset) and quite fast depending on other specs like Amount of ram, graphics memory (make sure graphics memory isn't shared with ram, it'll slow it down) but lacks dvd burner, hi end graphics, and other power consuming devices.
But Battery lasts anywhere between 15- 20+hrs. If you won't use power demanding programs this is a good choice.

Or just get a decent Asus, HP, MSi, Samsung Laptop with LED screen, power efficient models with 8 cell Battery. Should last a good 10+ hrs.

Good Laptop Brands: Asus, HP, MSi, Samsung and Toshiba (though it's not really good value- overpriced).
I work in IT in Australia and have been doing so for 5+ yrs. Hope it works for you both