What would you buy? If you look a few threads below this you'll see that mine was recently stolen so I'm buying a new one.

I'm looking at spending £500, so I want the best one for that amount of money. I'm very computer literate but I'm not up to date on laptops whatsoever and I've been settled with what I've got both desktop and laptop wise so looking up at new stuff hasnt happened in a while.

So if anyone can point me in the right direction, that would be great thanks

It all depends on what you want to use it for. There is more choice than ever these days. Screen sizes vary from 10" to 17"+.

Golden rule is whatever you buy, dump as much memory as you can into the thing, as much HD as well.

Dual core is the thing. When speccing Servers I always try for the best balance between cost and performance.

As for Manufacturers, I have always been a fan of Dell and Toshiba, both at home and professionally, they have been the best built, and most reliable.

We recently bought a Dell dual core 15" screen Inspiron with 4GB RAM and 500Gb of hard disk for £399, and up-specced the battery, doubling it's capacity for another tenner, and in normal use with Windows 7 home premium pre-loaded, it's blisteringly quick to my eyes.

I got myself ( a bit back) a Dell Vostro 1700 with 17" screen with 1920 screen res, and dual hard drives

I did get it for audio work and image editing (photoshop etc)

I would have got a Mac Book Pro but couldnt justify the cost, and I can run Snow Leopard on the Vostro too

Cost me 500 quid and best laptop ive had for quite some time

Bought a Dell Inspiron 1750 a while ago - Dual-Core 2.2GHz CPU with 4GB RAM.

Cost £420 in Feb this year.

i went for this in the end, £499 from dell

Base
Inspiron 1564 (UK, FCG1U) - i3-330M (2.13Ghz, 4Threads, 3M cache)
Memory
4096MB 1067MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM [2x2048]
Keyboard
Internal Keyboard
Video Card
Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator HD

asus ul80vt how much does it cost over there ?