Laptop's dead; looking for a new one

[Glimmervoid]

Well it finally happened. My Acer Aspire 7720 laptop died. After eating two power adaptors, loosing its sound wheel, loosing most of the guard fins from its heating grate, having numerous other bits fall off and a lot of other stuff, it finally had enough. The screen is now a mesh of coloured lines which slowly fade from black to white. I've spent some time trying to fix it, couldn't and it's time to lay it to rest.

Towards that end, I'm looking for a replacement and would like to hear any recommendations people have. I'm looking for a laptop in the £800 range (British). I'm not looking for a high end gaming laptop (though I would quite like to be able to play the odd game on it) but I do want something with a bit of power, not a netbook. Moreso, I want something which is going to last me for a few years, nether breaking or needing replaced the next time I buy an interesting game. The breaking part is, of course, partly down to chance but I'm hoping someone here has had good experience with a laptop/company and would recommend them.

That being said, does anyone have a recommendation?

[Number Theoretic]

I heared many good things about ThinkPad laptops, especially when it comes to Linux compatibility. Many of my friends are using Dell and claim the support there is excelllent, but i haven't tried that. A company they warned me about was Asus: bad support and bad product quality, but my desktop's main board is from Asus, from 2006 and still runs. So perhaps it's hit and miss. My brother also made a positive experience with Toshiba, but that was in Japan and 2 or 3 years ago.

More recently, i heared much buzz about laptops following Intel's "Ultrabook" specification. They come with an SSD drive, which lifts them into the 1000 euro range but makes them robust and fast booting. However, i wouldn't bet my money on good Linux support there, at least for the moment.

[Zaune]

Just as a point of clarification, are you absolutely committed to a laptop being your main and/or only computer? Eight hundred quid is a hell of a lot of money to drop on a machine that's going to be a huge pain to upgrade or even maintain and is quite possibly a write-off if you spill your tea on it.

[Glimmervoid]

Just as a point of clarification, are you absolutely committed to a laptop being your main and/or only computer? Eight hundred quid is a hell of a lot of money to drop on a machine that's going to be a huge pain to upgrade or even maintain and is quite possibly a write-off if you spill your tea on it.

Unfortunately, yes. I just don't have the room for a desktop at the moment.

Also, thank you Number Theoretic. I'll look into those.

[Darth Tanner]

Try PC Specialist, they make them to your requirements and their pricing isn’t that bad and for £800 you can get a pretty top range laptop.

A company they warned me about was Asus: bad support and bad product quality

I've got an Asus and my only complaint was that the screen fell off (thankfully within warranty which they fixed without too much complaint) other than this I've not heard that many bad things about them.

[Glimmervoid]

Try PC Specialist, they make them to your requirements and their pricing isn’t that bad and for £800 you can get a pretty top range laptop.

A company they warned me about was Asus: bad support and bad product quality

I've got an Asus and my only complaint was that the screen fell off (thankfully within warranty which they fixed without too much complaint) other than this I've not heard that many bad things about them.

I looked at PC Specialist and saw something I quite liked, the 17.3" Optimus II. (You can customise some of the options and I've done so, based upon what I could find out online)

I'm not much for gauging hardware, so how does this sound.

Processor: Intel® Core™i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-2430M (2.40GHz) 3MB
Memory (RAM): 4GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (2 x 2GB)
Graphics Card: nVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M - 2GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - Hard Disk: 1TB WD SCORPIO BLUE WD10JPVT, SATA 3 Gb/s, 8MB CACHE (5400 rpm)
Bluetooth & Wireless: GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS 802.11N CARD INC. BLUETOOTH 3.0
Battery: 62.16WH 6 Cell Lithium-ION Battery
Power Lead & Adaptor: 1 x UK Power Lead & 90W Adaptor (GT 540M) / 120W Adaptor (GT 555M)
Operating System: Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence
Warranty: 3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
And a lot of other fairly irrelevant stuff.
Total £865.00 inc VAT

[Darth Tanner]

Looks great to me, I'd upgrade your warranty to gold though, think its only a fiver for inclusive parts for the full 3 years.

The graphic card scores 1015 on CPUBenchmarks which isn’t bad for a laptop, it's five times the score of my laptops GeforceGo 7600 and I can comfortably play Medieval Total War 2 on that.

[phongn]

ThinkPad T-series is about the ultimate general laptop and are built far better than any consumer machine. Their GPU isn't too good, though.

[Glimmervoid]

I am currently looking at a XPS 17 from Dell. Its a bit better than the Optimus II for only a little more money. Same graphics card, same hard drive, more RAM and a i7 rather than i5 processor. I also know someone with one and he likes it.

What do people think?