My laptop broke! Recommendations for a new one?

[thatitalian]

Well, my laptop died yesterday after 6 trusty years of owning it.

I am now in the market for a new one and am open to recommendations. I need a laptop with a fairly powerful processor and a decent graphics card (for a laptop).

To give you an idea of spec and budget I was looking at this model.

Ideally I do not want to spend more than £650 approx, hence the potential US purchase as this would cost £1000 in the UK.

My concern with this particular model are the reviews it has received!

[shmokes]

How about the Asus u43jc-x1 bamboo laptop.  Beautiful machine.  Performance seems good.  And you can get a free $150 gift card from Amazon if you buy it there right now.

Or maybe now's the time to make the switch to a Macbook.

[Silas (son of Silas)]

I am on my third Dell after owning 8 HP laptops and I can honestly say it would take a lot to make me switch brands next time.

Laptops usually lasted about 6-7 months before giving up the ghost on me (I destroyed a lovely nc2400 once after only 3 days by dropping it down a flight of stairs) , but as work (HP at the time) was paying I didn't care too much (that sounds bad... I did care that I kept destroying laptops, but I didn't care about which brand). When I left HP I had to start buying my own. Had my first Dell (an Inspiron 15) for over a year before it was stolen. I bought another Inspiron and a Studio 15 and both are still going strong, despite the extreme abuse they receive on a daily basis (I drop them a lot  )

The customer service from Dell (here in the UK) has also been excellent on the 2 occasions when I broke my first Inspiron (Broke a key and killed a power supply).

[Malenko]

I hafta agree with shmokes on this one, Asus makes the BEST hardware (in my opinion) I just got( about 2 months ago) a new Asus K52 with the i5 processor 8GB of RAM 320GB HD and BluRay drive for about $1000 USD. Its freekin amazing. All the bench mark tests put it *just* under my quad core phenom desktop, which is amazing on a laptop.