any good laptop recommendations? my head is SWIMMING with Gigabytes and Vistas and i'm thinking of going to John Lewis, god help me.

[AitchwonderswhoFruitCrumbleis]

i am NOT GOOD at buying this kind of thing and bitterly regret the purchase of a Dell last time.

has anyone done this recently and ferreted out a fantastic machine for about 500 quid? it's really just a bit of browsing of MN and photos and word processing, most techie stuff passes me by.

yeah, like dh is going to go for that...

thanks for posting leonie, much appreciated but i'm happier with the build i think on the acer.

To be honest though, until fairly recently nearly every laptop has been 'far too expensive' when new, because until the switch to mosly widescreen laptops, they were a salesperson's PC, paid for by a business (and thus the retailers felts able to 'rip-off' those businesses).

Now that students and anyone might use a laptop (been years since I saw TV, but didn't the 'BT Broadband' "couple" {him single, her with one or more children} have a laptop from early on) rather than a mini-tower/ desktop, prices have come down considerably, plus non-'electrical' stores (supermarkets etc) add to the competition, and force the price down

800+ was the norm not too long ago, but now there are laptops under 300 (without some frills, but on a par with desktop PCs, which still rarely come close to the 200 pound or lower price, despite there being a screen in a laptop that might be 50+ pounds of the total cost, and a battery costing another 50+, plus stricter component tolerances, else laptop will be damaged by overheating, etc - nearly put "explode", but that may worry some people!)