New Laptop Help!

[Hail Sezer]

Hey guys. Looking at getting a new laptop at the end of this year as my current one (HP Pavilion dv6) is looking to **** itself after 2 years of noble service.

I'm a uni student, but for the purpose of this thread I'm willing to put price tag aside and just see what my best options would be.

I'm really not that up with all the hardware jargon so was hoping someone here could shed some light on what sort of things I should be looking for? What brands should I stay away from?

I'm impartial as to whether it is windows or mac, and am going to be using it mainly for study, so want to be able to take it to lectures etc without it being a hassle. For this same reason I'm after something with a strong battery life.

Not too sure how to word my other needs in relation to the ol' tech jargon..but to sum it up I want something fast, not too big/heavy, reliable and ideally with a nice display-I watch a lot of movies etc.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Cheers.

[DIEHARD]

Im no expert but my toshiba has always had a terrible battery. Apart from that it works fine, but not always great at uni unless you sit near a powerpoint!

[C-Whiz]

I am literally currently in the process of re-installing everything on my old Acer, but for what it's worth, this thing is about 4 years old and is a workhorse. By workhorse, i mean it's downloaded more risque internet content than any other PC that has gone before it, however, the point of this post is to inform you that the battery life is very ordinary, so I upgraded to a bigger capacity battery and Acer are notorius for getting hot when being pushed to perform. For lectures/documents i don't think it would be too much of an issue.

Pros: cheap, sturdy, reliable, good value for what you get.

Cons: average battery life, gets hot.

My other half has a small net-book, which is small, light and has about an 11 hour battery life. It is an Asus, good quality. It is reasonably cheap (cost under $300) and is perfect for internet/documents/pictures etc.

not so good for video and heavy processing as it only has a very small processor (intel Atom) and 1G ram, but we take it O/S for kids to play games on long flights and to dump all our picture/video data on. it has been great.

I would highly recommend something like this for Uni if you don't mind a 10" screen and a reduced keyboard. Battery life is phenomonal.

[C-Whiz]

Like this thing here.

http://eeepc.asus.com/au/products.html?n=0

[Smakked]

With Laptops it comes down to money and you get what you pay for, Lenovo are good work horses, but cost a little more, as portability goes, Samsung 9 series are the bomb but ****in expensive.

Stay away from Acer.

In the bottom Line Asus are pretty good value for money, myself I own Hp, Dell and Toshiba. all have different Pros and Cons.

Lenovo are the best to work on they male there stuff to come apart and put back together with ease, something no other manufacture does. I did work for IBM/Lenovo fr 3 years fixing them and they are by far the easiest to do.