looking to buy laptop? any recommendations?

macman

ringo was quoting a price from Dell Outlet, not the Dell main site. Prices are cheaper on Outlet because they are pre-built orders that have been cancelled or returned.
The downsize is that you can't customise the spec, you can only buy what they have on at the time.

[Deleted User]

Yup. And just to say as a warning, my Dell outlet laptop arrived with a broken DVD drive, which took 30 minutes on the phone to establish. However, Dell did arrange to have someone pick it up and fix.. picked up on the monday, returned on the friday. Good service, but a little disapointed it came broken. However, it saved me a few hundred quid so i don't mind too much.

It's my second outlet PC (first one had no problems at all) and i would recommend it as a way of MSEing your laptop purchase.

With 3Gb of RAM, i can run Paintshop Pro 9, Adobe Lightroom 2 and Google Picasa 3 all at once without any of them struggling. I was editing DNG files in Lightroom (10mp, big files) and i had several 10mp images loaded into Paintshop Pro.

I wish i'd seen the £460 laptop, it's a great spec for the price. However, yes, you don't get to pick your exact spec (and sometimes lower spec machines cost more.. it's an odd system.) However, if you see something you like, its worth it.

The outlet can be found here: www.dell.co.uk/outlet

I don't consider 17" laptops portable... mine is a desktop replacement. I wouldn't want to lug one around unless i was traveling by car a lot

edit: link fixed.

macman

That link is dead ringo. try:
http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/default.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=dfo&dgc=BA&cid=40224&lid=1028300