Acer Aspire 5536

For a sub £500 laptop, this little Acer beauty will impress. I bought one of these recently after looking through all the usuals such as Dell, Compaq and Toshiba and for the money, this one beats the rest hands down.

I ended up going to Currys as they had the best deal available - I would recommend getting the 4GB of RAM and then upgrading to Windows 7 64bit as the 32bit version bundles with most laptops only utilises 2GB of memory.

The look and feel of this laptop is outstanding - I particularly like the dark blue finish and the smooth trackpad. It also has a numberpad which you won't find on most laptops.

The features are standard, built in ATI Radeon on board graphics (runs Half Life 2 really well), a decent enough sound and around 2.5 hours battery life. The BEST thing about this laptop is the speed! Mostly down to the AMD Turion Dual Core chip and 4GB ram, it's quick and runs Photoshop alongside multiple other applicatons with ease.

It's also quiet, well cooled and pretty light. I have seen many a laptop and all in all this is THE BEST value for money one can have,