Hi,
We are looking at buying a laptop, for our son (17yrs old) for Christmas, he will hopefully be going to Uni next year so will need it mainly for uni work, email, network sites, music etc. Just have no idea were to start.
Have roughly £500 to spend, which would have to include insurance. Can anyone recommend a good all round perfoming laptop.
Regards Karen

im looking to get one myself, as this one is a few years old, not much memery left and SO slow and keeps crashing, ive been looking for one with plenty of memory,
tesco had a few i liked and not bad on prise, this is the one i was going to get but due to snow they have none in stock
compaq
CQ61407   15.6'' sized screen
processor: Athlon II M320
processor Speed: 2.1GHz
hard drive: 500GB
memory: 4GB
optical drive: DVD rewriter
operating system: Windows 7 Home Premium
graphics: ATIHD 4200, 128MB
wi-fi: Yes
UBS conections: 3
webcam: yes
Weight: 2.8Kg
Price: £429
copyed from the catalog, i dont understand all of it but seemed to be the cheepest with that amount of memory. hopefully someone with more computer knolege than my very limited amount that can help you. (as long as i can figure out how to turn it on im happy lol)

This one i have now (actualy got free from college for being dislexic) is an acer and use to work great, did all my college cources on it

Hi Lollie,

I was looking for a new computer or laptop recently and was given this advice on here
http://www.champdogsforum.co.uk/cgi-bin/board/topic_show.pl?pid=1190650;hl=laptop#pid1190650

I have narrowed mine down to 2, but yet to purchase as need to bring up the funds as they aren't cheap. PC World gave me a lot of information and they said you can't beat anything from Apple!!! They said second to that the Sony Vaio are very good.. As for Dell the man wasn't keen, but everyone who has one said they are brilliant and you can build your own to the spec you want.

At £500 it's going to be about getting the most for your money and that may depend on what deals are out there.  Some of the big stores will sell ex display models at quite good prices.  There's no better option than to do the legwork and trawl round a few places. 

When you ask for advice you'll need to be quite specific about what your son intends to use the laptop for.  Will he use it for gaming as well as work?  Tell him to be honest - it's no good telling you he won't play if he really wants to!!  The store will advise the best option for his type of use.

Personally I'd avoid Hewlett Packard like the plague, I've never had any trouble with Dell, don't mind Sony (but not that enthusiastic), like Acer for budget machines, and always hear good things about Toshiba.

I suspect you may do much better with an extra £100 so perhaps it's worth waiting til after Christmas so that he can add some spending money of his own.  Have a look at some review sites so that you can see what options are available and what to shop for ie memory, processor speed

Thanks all you you for responding, it really is a minefield out there..
Took the plunge yesterday and went out shopping.
found a really helpful guy at PC world/currys, who worked for Windows as opposed to the store.He was really knowledgeable and didn't take to us like idiots (which some of them do) but he explained everything very clearly.
In the end, it was between a Packard Bell and the acer, we went with the Acer in the end, which was also on offer and got the Office package and Insurance and still had a little bit of change.
Regards Karen

Hi Karen, well done for getting the help you needed - it's not an easy decision is it -  but a knowledgable friendly person makes it soo much easier to part with your cash! :)