High end notebook recommendations please

[McGraw]

Hello.

My Dad is looking for a laptop which I suppose would be classed as a desktop replacement as it is purely for use in different rooms of the house.

He is willing to pay up to £2k for one but we are struggling to find one that fits the bill.

It is for general web browsing, word processing and e-mail in the main but as a secondary function it needs to be a hi-def DVD player with a big enough and good enough screen to watch from the end of the bed. If it had good internal speakers as well, that would be great.

Gaming is of secondary consideration, so where performance is important, as long as it will run Vista with Aero well and play reasonably recent games then that is fine. We looked at Alienware but SLI is a waste of time and money.

So, is there a laptop with the following features?

20" 1920x1080 screen.
HDMI out (to use the Blu-ray or HD-DVD on the main TV) and in (or something like it to archive SKY +)

The Vaio looks good but only has a 17" screen. The Dell XPS looks good (especially with the detachable wireless keyboard) but the screen res is only 1440x?.

Is there anything that does it all?

Other than that, if nothing fits the bill, what is the best laptop between £1000 and £1500? It must have a 17" screen (ideally wide) and have a decent amount of ram and a fast hard drive (size isn't that important). Build quality and looks are also very important.

Thanks a lot.

This is crying out mistake he could build(or buy) 2 or 3 highend(ish) desktops for 2 grand and have one by his tv one in his bedroom and 1 in his office. Your not going to fill your requirements with a laptop imo but you would with a tower or 3

[McGraw]

I agree to be honest but it has to be a laptop.

So, can you recommend me one purely for normal office work, browsing etc for about a grand.

High quality screen, build quality and looks are important.

Cheers.

One of the alienwares maybe I know its a Turion but it covers everything just about use wise in post 1
http://www.evesham.com/products/info...C-5C2183B3E539
how about this for 1400 ?

[handyman]

Toshiba make some nice laptops that are suitable for hd dvd watching.

[keithwalton]

The only 20" laptop i know of is the dell xps m2010. Which has a 20.1" panel on it, isnt much of a laptop though you can move it around! It's resolution however is 1680x1050. Thats pretty much as high as you're going to get, anymore more and you'll be into the dell 24" monitor territory.

I'd personally say go for a laptop that packs the punch in what you want it to do (blu-ray / hd rom drive will cost you a packet!) and get a decent external monitor / tv to plug it into. That way you can go much bigger than 20" for much less (dell's 24" is ~£550 if you know where to get it)

A friend of mine recently brought a dell inspiron 9400 and is loving it, though he got it at the right time (lots of freebie upgrades) keep an eye out for deals on it as he got a 2GHz core 2 duo, 120gb hard drive, 2 gigs of ram, 17" lcd and ati x1400 all for around the £900 mark

[Nikesh]

Bloody hell, I didn't even realise you could get 20in laptops!!

[Shaun]

Why not get a basic laptop (one that will run what you want) and buy an LCD screen to plug into it and leave that at the end of the bed?

[Virgin Mary]

This for under £1K,

Acer Aspire 9802WKMi - Core Duo T2300E / 1.66 GHz - Centrino Duo - RAM : 1 GB - HD : 120 GB - DVD±RW (+R double layer) / DVD-RAM - Gigabit Ethernet - WLAN : 802.11a/b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR - Win XP MCE 2005 - 20.1" Widescreen TFT 1680 x 1050 ( WSXGA+ )

The HD DVD drive is available for the 9800 series, it should come to the Uk anytime now, I saw one in an exhibition in Taipei last Thursday.

here it is.

[Nikesh]

What about buying a 20inch iMac and just using a wireless keyboard and mouse? If you want Windows, you could just buy an xp license.....

[McGraw]

Cheers.

He's binned the idea off of using it as a portable DVD player now.

Wants a Hewlett Packard now because he likes the look of them.

Any reason not to get one?

Also, what are Nvidia 7600 graphics cards like?

How would it compare to say, my Radeon XL800 and his desktop's Geforce Mx 5200?

Thanks a lot.

it will do