Tet's Journal: Finding the right laptop

The time has come for a new laptop. But how do I find the right one? My requirements are minimal. Namely, I need a large screen, decent battery life and a low price. Surely there must be a laptop comparison site somewhere that lets me enter my specs and it'll give some recommendations, right? Yes, I can go to Toshiba's site and there's a great tool that does exactly that. Dell's and Acer's are adequate but not quite as good as Toshiba, and HP don't have one at all. But all of them are restricted to a single brand (as you'd expect). Where is the cross brand equivalent? Further, there are no doubt brands I've never heard of that I might be interested in, and without knowing who they are, I can't go to their web sites to check their offerings even if I wanted to.

Any CPU will be more than sufficient for my needs. The screen needs to be at least 17", and not gloss (which sadly seems to rule out the otherwise promising models from Samsung). I need 2GB RAM, and I don't want to be paying more than £500. A bit of digging reveals that all of the major players have models that meet those requirements. But I still have the nagging feeling that I'm missing out of the "right" model simply because I don't know about it. Where should I be looking?

Oh, and it won't have an Apple badge, so don't even consider suggesting that...

No magic bullet

[Captain Splendid]

Hit cnet, amazon, newegg...spend an hour combing reviews and nitpicks and you'll have your machine.

A shop?

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

You know, physical places where you could go to actual compare products side by side?

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Oddly enough, with your requirements, I'm going to side with Cur...ehm... ehm... the bloke above.... It won't even be that much more expensive.

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[Tet]

The problem is that shops here in the UK tend to have a terrible selection. Sure, I can find the best of the options they have available, but I'll guarantee they won't have the most suitable model available in the market for my requirements. I would guess that most computer shops here will have perhaps 7-10 models of laptop, of which probably 0 or 1 will meet my requirements.

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[jawtheshark]

I tend to go cheapest available on sale :-D Hence any laptop is good enough for me[1]. I can understand. Your biggest requirement seems to be the big screen (high resolution, I guess). That was one of the main concerns for my dads new laptop too. However, since he keeps machines for ages (the current one replaced a P-III 733MHz laptop, so you can guess the age), price is no objection. He went Alienware Core i7, loads of RAM and a huuuuuug screen. It will probably survive him.

What I would do in your c

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[tomhudson]

So go to the onine sites of the stores in question - you'll be able to compare side-by-side.

No Apples Need Apply...

[johndiii]

"No Apple" and "low cost" are fairly redundant. :-) No way that you're going to find a 17" in your price range, except maybe used. I love my MacBook, but your requirements are for something else.

I tried to look for battery life numbers a while back, but I found very little of what I would consider reliable data. Find a reputable site that reviews laptops, and see what they say.

I've had good luck with Dell laptops, though the last one that I bought was in 2004 (last laptop before my current MacBook). My