Daughter wants laptop but how to pick, headache

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Hi my daughter recently had her laptop stolen and needs to get a new one for college. She comes to me who is supposed to be technically minded and says find me one, as if it is as easy as that.

A while back my other daughter bought a laptop which seemed great on the surface but a little while later I found out all sorts of things about it that were annoying like the fact a lot of the ram was borrowed by the video card or something like that which to me always seems like a bit of a con as most people will not realise these things. She wants probably to spend £500 give or take £100 depending what this brings up, obviously reliability is most important.

We want oobviously the best you can get for that money, that is what it says it is and is not sharing everything like memory etc, any help/guidance would really be appreciated.
 
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I bought an acer5102 brand new full 12 month guarantee for £300 from the link below, retail at the time was about £450. Its used every day for most of the day have'nt had a problem.
They are based in Bracknell.

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Green-PC-UK-Limited
 
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For that kinda money make sure you get an Intel Core 2 Duo, with at least 1GB of Ram and 80GB hard drive. Seperate graphics card with it's own memory is preferable, but not such a problem if you're not playing modern games or you've got plenty of Ram in the first place.

If you can get a laptop with XP over Vista that will be a big advantage. Laptops aren't quite up to running Vista full speed yet, it requires at least 2GB of ram to run smoothly. This would be my preference, others may disagree.
 
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I dont' know much about laptops, but you can go onto Dell's website and actually customise what you want. I think the base laptop is about £430 with 2mb RAM and 160gb hard drive and you can customise it to have more RAM/bigger hardrive, different screen, colours, video cards, etc.
 
TBH you are much better off buying an ACER or GATEWAY laptop
from TESCO

They are currently offering TRIPLE POINTS.. so thats a little wedge of cash back for next quarters shopping.
 
I wouldn't buy a gateway - maybe an acer, but you're better off with a Dell, HP or (having seen some of the new ones recently) a Toshiba. This is based on seeing 2 or 3 new or nearly new laptops of varying makes per day, and owning two HPs and a Dell. (my old tosh was a bit poo, but it was really old, they're better now - the great thing about toshiba is that they always come with a decent recovery CD for the OS)
 
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