This is definitely good advice. 

Everyone told me that acer sucks but I started school in sept and I got a really good price on one. I have not had any problems it (except for vista) and it cost me several hundred canadian then the same specs for any other brand. That being said I am going to reserve my final judgement a while longer just to be sure the damn thing keeps working (I had a dell laptop where I had to keep replaceing things all of the time after about 6 months). but so far so good so I don't understand all of the flack.

Also everyone I know that has a mac book loves it, but they are seriously expensive. I've used them before and I found them pretty easy to use with very little training.

Acer are made to be cheap. I know happy owners of Acer, but I also encountered many unhappy ones :(. I would consider an Acer only for an extremely good deal. 

Again, think whether you need dedicated memory or not for the video card.

- no dedicated memory: cheap laptops, thin, last very long on battery, don't have problems with overheating, good for office/internet/programming. Even a software like Photoshop works acceptably on such a video card.

- dedicated memory: substantially more expensive (at least 2-300$), do overheat, less portable, needed for front-end games.

Make a list with the software you're planning to use and see the requirements for the video card! And look around, see prices, differences, etc.

What do you mean by "video"? Full HD?

Well now you use words like front-end games and Full Hd maybe that is a bit extreme! I guess watching movies, I want them to be clear etc?

It seems dedicated memory cards have more cons than pros for what I'm looking for!

Movies you can watch on any laptop.

Look for the prices also! I have the feeling that one with dedicated video card would be over your budget. I don't know exactly.

I <3 my macbook and mac book pro. They are worth every penny and have a much higher resail value. That is all. :)

I am not sure you read all the posts or you skip the longer ones, I agree with you and have suggested on my post just prior to your's the same thing, please do read it, my post is dated: 1st December 2008, 02:19pm, same day as your's.

Specs on this laptop are  good. Even a 2.6 Mhz processor with an FSB of 800 is better than 3.3 Mhz with a 533Mhz processor as this is speed.

Memory with DDR2 is not up to recent tech.

The graphic card at 128 Mb is obsoleete, at least a 256 and today a 512 is becoming the norm.

It all depends on your budget and what you want to do with your Lpt.

get a pink one.....

 Very good point and thanks for bringing it up.

 LOB why do you want a laptop? Can you settle on a PC or do you need to carry it around?

If you want a PC I can give you, I believe, good suggestions for your money,and Sharikin is right a Pc get you more bang for the bucks or should I say sterling pound.

 Cardinal sin!

Look Ireland up on a map of the world!

 I do apologize, you have the euro or the € symbol.

No I require it to be portable.. I wouldn't be carrying a desktop down to the chess club or into school for projects :P

Alf,

Don't worry too much about hard disk size, you can add a free standing hard drive later. You won't need to access all of your files all of the time. I just added a 1 Terrabyte drive to my system for only £120!

 I will agree to a point but get at least a 120 or 160 Gb hard drive, however if you need speed and not much storage capacity go with an 80G drive with not 7500 rpm but 10,000 or higher and do go with the maximum cache drive you can get at least 8Mb but preferable 12 to 16. The cache is what stores your previous entries or seeks or access to a given program or operations, I say it in many words so you can grasp the meaning of cache.

The computer stores your previous actions and when you want to access them again it will access faster when your cache Mb is higher as it stores more information, However if you do only one or 2 operations when you use your computer then the cache size is not relevant. 

Some people have nothing to do but posting random things. I haven't seen usual laptops with hard drives of 10.000 rpm (rotation per minute). The maximum speed is 7500 rpm, with 5400 being the most common.

 You are some piece of a puzzle that I will never figure out,

I did  mention in my interventions that what I was suggesting was all about desktop PC'S, you may not have done your homework, not uncommon for people criticizing, and you may not have read my posts,

I was suggesting specs based on a desktop Pc as I clearly mentioned that I do not have a portable device  and that I am not familiar with it, just general specs..

You are at the lowest life of ,.,,

I would say as Brutus said : tu stultus est.

Your interventions have beeen sporadic and only to mostly to comment on, I think that ,,, I suggest that you give your opinion on what the lap system specs should be.

Then we can all see your expertize, type wrongly to ..,

The Dell Studio 15 - 679 EURO

Looks good! of course, value would depend on price.... I'm sure you did okay there, though.

Lob: I'm sure this laptop is OK for all your needs. But if you don't tell the price, nobody can say if it's worth the money or not. In Canada, such a laptop would be under 600 Euros. If you want an advice, come with 2-3 models of laptops you like, put here their specifications (processor, memory and video card) and the price. Usually integrated webcams are not very good, I prefer to buy a better one separately. A hard-disk of 250 G is quite big. Microsoft Works is useless when you can download Open Office for free. And on that video card very demanding games will not work.