good notebook for less than £1300

[furman]

Hi,
I am looking to buy a good notebook within my budget of £1300. I will be travelling so I would like something light. I don't want Acer as a friend had a good spec Acer but the fans were always clogged up and it was always overheating.

I want a powerful machine if possible, 1.8g plus, 80/100 gb hdd, DVDRW, good graphics card, 17" preferably not widescreen with good resolution as I use 1600*1200 on my home pc. I had a look at a Dell Inspiron for £1377 with some customisations, 1.86 dual core, 1024 ram, 80gb hdd but I am not sure about Dell servicing in Egypt which is why I am thinking of Sony or IBM.

 

[BoomAM]

Im a fan of the Thinkpads.
Best made laptops out. And a wide range to choose from.
For £1300, you can get a Z60M, which has the same specs as the one i review in my sig.
Although, if you make cuts in some areas of the laptop, you could get a CoreDuo laptop.

 

[tzang]

The Acer Ferrari range would probably be your best bet IMO. I know you want to avoid Acer but the 4005WLMi model seems to fit your requirements and I've never heard of Acer laptop fans clogging up

The 4005WLMi comes with a 2GHz AMD Turion processor, 1Gb RAM, 100Gb HDD & DVD+/-RW as standard. It has a widescreen 15.4" which runs at 1680x1050 and the quality if pretty good. This is accompanied by an ATi Mobility Radeon X700 which does fairly well with modern games. Prices fall around £1250 depending on whether you opt for the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows XP Pro. At 2.9kg, it is light for a 15.4" laptop weight (partially due to the carbon fibre casing which reduces some of the weight).

A 17" laptop will fall around 4kg which is rather heavy, but that will depend on you. Price for 17" laptops with 1Gb RAM are also pretty expensive, at around £1500-1700 average. The only other laptop I've found that has a 17" screen at under £1300 would be the Acer 9504WLMi. It only supports res. of up to 1440x900 but with a 120Gb HDD and double video memory size compared to the 4005WLMi at 256Mb. It also runs at 2GHz but with an Intel Centrino processor.