So my crappy Advent 9315 Intel Core Duo T5250 1.6Ghz has seen better days - the optical drive's fucked, and both OSs (XP and Vista) are having a nasty case of the gremlins. I'm going to eke out as much additional lifespan as possible, but it may soon be time to take a trip to PCWorld.

Is anybody burning to recommend a PC laptop in the £300-400 range? Doesn't have to be anything fancy, but preferably sub-15" with a 2Ghz processor and 2GB RAM.

You ever notice how UK based shopping sites suck?  They all look like they're from the 90s.

This is what proper PC shops look like.

http://www.newegg.com/

http://ncix.com/

Notice how they have forums where you can watch the nerds argue over any and all differences about the hardware.  You can even ask in the NCIX forums what they think of a purchase you're considering even if you're not shopping there.  They'll be happy to tell you everything that's wrong with it, including things you didn't even consider.

I would look closely at the ACER and ASUS notebooks more carefully, the other brands are junk in that price range.   

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/118586

That one looks nice, its 15.6 but widescreen. 

I like the look of that one. Very much. Great suggestion.

The Advent just conked out totally - hard drive sounds like a bees nest - so will definitely be paying the shops a visit tomorrow....

So I ended up getting a refurbished Acer Aspire 5535 - AMD Turion 2 GHz dual core, 4 gigs of RAM, Vista Basic, £370. No major shakes but it'll serve my purposes. In a fit of tech hunger, I also went and bought an Acer netbook - 1.6 GHz, a gig of RAM, Windows XP - which should do for word processing, Skype, email and music whenever I'm running around London like a headless, impoverished chicken.

Cool, how well does the netbook work?

Is an office page usable in that resolution?

I'd like to get a small netbook too but for the price you pay for them you can almost buy a small laptop.  I'll probably just wait for Windows 7 anyways. 

The netbook was £300, and if you can find a similar-sized laptop for that price then all credit to you :)

You wouldn't want it as a primary work computer, but if you like to write or use the net on the go it's a solid investment. The RAM and processor are sturdy enough to run Word, Firefox (playing Youtube vids), MSN and Skype side by side reasonably smoothly. I haven't really experimented yet, but it should be up to some straightforward, low-res image editing and Flash gaming as well. Another key advantage for me is that it saves my laptop a lot of wear and tear - those things really don't enjoy being portable, whatever the advertisers may claim.

If you're thinking of getting one I'd prioritise a good-sized keyboard and long battery life. Some of the keyboards I tried were nigh unusable, and my paws aren't massive. You might also want to bump the 1 gig RAM (seems to be the industry standard) to 2 gigs if you're worried about performance.

Aren't Dell offering a free upgrade to Windows 7 on all their Vista machines? Probably doesn't apply to the netbooks (most of which run XP).

Yeah I'm in no rush.  I mostly just want one to dick around with.  But the reason I want to wait for Windows 7 is so the things comes with proper firmware and drivers.  Upgrading an OS on a laptop never works well, if I buy a laptop I want it ready out of the box. 

The older I get the less patience I have for shit like that.

windows 7 uses vista drivers